[elrepo] RTL 8187B driver

[Del]

Phil Perry wrote:
>> The RTL 8187B driver is available in the newer (2.6.27+) kernels and 
>> would be a useful driver backport for ELRepo.  Once again I'm unsure as 
>> to how to do this but if someone gives me some guidelines I'll give it a go.
>>
>> Information here:
>>
>> http://rtl-wifi.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page
>> http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/blog/rtl8187b-drivers-and-patches/
>> http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/blog/linux-on-the-satellite-a215-s7407/
>> http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/rtl8187
>>
>> Hopefully someone can make use of this information and bring this driver 
>> into ELRepo.
>>
>> Thanx,
>>
>> Del
> 
> I had a very quick look at this one, and the current mainline kernel 
> source doesn't build out of tree against EL5.3. Looks like it might be a 
> bit of work to backport a working driver.

OK.

> Again, could you please test the latest testing kernel from Red Hat just 
> to check it's not been backported for EL5.4.

Have done, no luck.

The current kernel has a driver for the RTL8187 but not RTL8187B 
chipsets.  The USB bus sees the hardware but the driver mistakenly 
identifies it as an RTL8180 and doesn't bring up the network interface.

There are some patches the the driver that's in 2.6.24 to make it work 
for RTL8187B but I'm not sure how easy it would be to backport those 
patches to 2.6.18.

Del