iwl3945 status in fedora7

[Andy Green]

Deependra Shekhawat wrote:

> I think iwlwifi atm is not the right candidate to be in the kernel it
> really
> doesn't work for me. I have lenovo 3000N100 laptop and ipw3945 with source
> compilation works great for me.

Well, some points

 - yeah it is not stable here either.  But -->

 - other folks are getting better results.  This laptop stays up with
wireless for up to 48 hrs with current rawhide kernels before losing
association and doing the 100% CPU modprobe -r thing forcing the need of
a reboot.  Other folks with a shutdown in the evening and boot in the
morning pattern might not even see the problem much.

 - ipw3945 is not an option AIUI because the "regulatory daemon" is not
licensed in a way that is compatible with Fedora (somehow the closed
source firmware is but I guess that devil-supping spoon is long enough)

 - Intel are submitting the iwlwifi/iwl3945 stuff to linux-wireless at
the moment and it is getting some serious iterative external review now.
 It'll probably be accepted soon and that will improve the previous
process (handing patchbombs to Linville apparently) somewhat.  The Intel
folks seem to be continuing to work hard on it too -- so all the signs
are that it will continue to improve in the coming months.  Therefore
because of the importance of wireless to laptop users, and the number of
people with 3945s, it is probably a good choice to accept to ship FC7
with a mostly working iwlwifi that will do something reasonable out of
the box for many people, and expect to see it improve over the update
kernels shipped during FC7 lifetime.  Otherwise the choice is to ship
nothing, not even mostly-working support, for a large number of laptop
users.

-Andy