Rethinking the Ralink wireless driver situation

[Jonathan Underwood]

Hi,

In F-7 a decision was made to bundle in the rt2x00 wireless drivers
for Ralink cards. I contend this was a poor decision because, simply
put, they do not work. Not for any ralink chipset device I have tried
(and I've tried several). Upstream rt2x00 developers have also gone on
a 3 month development hiatus. See: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/

But, upstream also maintains what they refer to as enhanced legacy
drivers - basically the open source drivers provided by Ralink but
polished to be more consistent with general use (eg. ripping out the
odd /etc/Wireless configuration tree, and placing firmware in
/lib/firmware). This work *really* well on all devices I have tried
for which rtx00 does not work. It's a hassle for an end user to
install them though, as it involves blacklisting the broken rtx00
modules. Not a big deal, but it wrecks the "out of the box"
experience.

So, please please consider bundling the rt2400, rt2500, rt2470, rt61
and rt73 drivers for F-8 and ditching rt2x00 until they make it into
the upstream kernel.

Jonathan.