Driver update: Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 0.56

At Sourceforge, a number of people are working in collaboration with Intel on Linux drivers for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100, a network card found in many Centrino laptops. The drivers work on Linux with kernel version 2.6 or higher and 2.4 when patched, and require the Wireless Tools for Linux. The changelog accompanying this release shows the following changes

Changes in 0.56:

• A patch for building 0.56 on 2.4 can be found here (thanks to Giuseppe Della Ricca)
• Changed ipw2100_netdev to use netdev_priv
• Changed use of timers for RF switch check and hang check to use deferred workqueue
• Remapped debug numbering such that lower numbers produce fewer messages
• Fixed problem with TX Watchdog kicking in occassionally if WPA is being used
• Fixed latest wireless tools reporting failure when using ‘iwconfig ethX power on’
• Fixed problem with 802.1x not working with in configurations where WEP was enabled (thanks to Pedro Ramalhais)
• Changed ‘Corruption detected’ message to ‘PCI latency error detected’ to remove confusion of there possibly being disk data corruption.
• Fixed spurious interrupt problem if driver fails to load (thanks to Yi Zhu)
• Fixed support for manual disable switch (thanks to Yi Zhu)
• Fixed resume maintaining manual disable state (thanks to Ralf Hemmenstaedt)
• Fixed sysfs permissions on module parameter entries (thanks to Yi Zhu)
• Synchronized ieee80211 with ipw2200 v0.11
• Fixed problem with channels not being reported in scan output
• Fixed ordering of scan results to keep networks in order across iterative probe receipts
• Fixed scan aging to be based on time vs. scan count
• Added time since last beacon received to scan output
• Pulled out 2.4 specific #ifdef/#endif blocks
• Reduced command timeout to 0.5s vs 3s
• Added command_send check to the hang_check to try and identify hung firmware

Known issues in 0.56

• If C3 is enabled, you may occasionally see “PCI latency error detected at 0x….:” messages in your kernel log, followed by a firmware reset. A temporary work around is to disable the C3 low power state (either via the patch on the website to processor.c or by unloading the ACPI processor module).

NOTE: Firmware was upgraded with 0.55. If you haven’t upgarded to the 1.3 firmware, you can obtain the latest firmware from http://ipw2100.sf.net/firmware.php†