[Gnewsense-dev] low wifi connectivity (rtl8187)

[Robert Millan]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 08:29:50AM +0800, address@hidden wrote:
> Dear all,
>    I am Fuxin Zhang from Lemote. Now I am managing Lemote, if you have any
> questions or requests, please write to me.
>    I am in gnewsense-dev too.
>    Dear  Robert,
>       For technical  contact, you can write to address@hidden, he is
> the project manager of Yeeloong. For software related parts, you can
> also write directly to {penglj,yanh,sunhy,address@hidden

Thank you Fuxin.  I'm adding everyone to CC, if someone is CCed and shouldn't
be, just let me know!

Graziano has reported (and I can confirm too) that the wifi performs very
poorly [1].  It seems this is a problem with the rtl8187 driver, affecting
both the Linux in gNewSense (built from your git tree) and the Linux images
you're distributing in the stock distro.

We also found about this build:

  
http://medan.cinnamonpirate.com/pool/non-free/l/linux-extramodules-2.6.27.1-medan/linux-extramodules-2.6.27.1-medan_2.6.27.1.medan.20090205-5_mipsel.deb

which is presumably based on source code from:

  
http://www.lemote.com/upfiles/wifi/rtl8187B_linux_26.1049.1215.2008_release2.tar.gz

is known to perform properly.  When I inspected it, it seems to be a much older
version of the driver that made it to Linux.  Since there's a regression, maybe
it can be easily bisected but I haven't tried yet;  I wanted to know first if
you had any first hand knowledge of this problem.

[1] http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00266

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."