Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:06:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Davide Subject: My story To: jsun@junsun.net Hi ... my name is David Rao and I had fun attempting to upgrade firmware on my PCMCIA ELSA airlancer MC-11. In the and I hadto do a windoze update with agere firmware update tool (all in one executable) .... teach me how to extract station and primary firmware from the cards once I have upgraded them and i can avoid other people from doing the windoze experience ... I did try prism2_srec -f [and various other parameter combinations] but I had no luck. Ok ... here is the story: My experience in updating the firmware on 2 ElSA Airlancer MC-11 The cards are orinoco based and work with the orinoco_cs kernel driver. Ever since some kernel version I noticed that there was some issue with bothe myMC-11 cards: Regardless of which one was first plugged int to the computer, the first attemptwould end up with the card going into a wierd state in which it would never associate to anything. The seolution was to unplug the first and plug in the second (ahdy workaroud if you have 2 but if you aonly have one you are screwed eccept for some random first go is good). I cannot reproduce the exact dmesg messages but this is what used to happen tillI upgraded the firmware Bad run (using orinoco driver since hostap seems to have problems especially on one of my 2 cards): Status: Connected (0001) Status: Disconnected (0002) And from here it's not possible to recover without waiting a long time. I tryed variuos combinations of iwpriv, insertions, sleep, resume and ejects. Every time I had luck I was never able to reproduce the procedure so I deduced it's just randomic. Good Run: Status: Connected (0001) Status: Disconnected (0002) Status: Connected (0001) And from here the card works fine. I started looking into a firmware upgrade because I suspected that the newer kernel drivers were is some way incompatible with the firmware on my MC-11 (since before some kernel release I never experienced this problem). I did nof find much talk on firmware updateing on the ELSA Airlancer MC-11 card and even less the nothing specific to doing it on linux :-( I found out that the my elsa cards use different firmware to most prism2 based cards. this was the old firmware I had (on bothe cards): Host AP driver diagnostics information for 'wlan0' NICID: id=0x0001 v4.0.1 (unknown) PRIID: id=0x0015 v4.0.1 STAID: id=0x001f v6.6.1 (station firmware) I also found out that possibly the original orinoco card firmware was possibly compatible but I was unable to use the orinoco flash tool to upgrade the elsa card ... and I was unable to extract the firmware from the orinoco all-in-one executable with firmware hidden inside. I then tried with the agere card firmware update tool whic did work. This is where I got it if anyone is intrested: http://laptopvideo2go.com/drivers/wlan/agere_driver_v7.82_&_firmware_update_package.exe And if someone explains to me how I could extract the firmware so that it could be flashed with prism2_srec I would be happy to avoid other people the windoze experience :-) I did try with prism2_srec -d ... but I could not get it working. Success and Failures: since the firmware upgrade bothe my MC-11 cards work first go with the orinoco_cs kernel driver. Unfortunately nothing changed with regards to the hostap kernel driver: the cards still produce a lot of noise in the kernel ring buffer and one still freezes after a few Mb of traffic pass trough it. The latter is really weird because the cards are the same, they had the same Fw before upgrade and also after upgrade, and both work fine with the orinoco kernel driver.