[elrepo] Broken kmod-compat-wireless package

[Phil Perry]

Hi folks,

We've had a number of reports of the compat-wireless package being 
broken on EL 6.3.

I've now had time to spend a couple days looking into this so wanted to 
take the opportunity to update where we are on this and decide if it's 
worth pursuing.

Basically, compat-wireless is an effort by the compat-wireless project 
to backport the wireless branch of drivers from the latest kernel to 
earlier kernels. The elrepo project merely packages this effort for RHEL6.

As of kernel 3.3 they (compat-wireless) added support for RHEL6 which is 
based upon a 2.6.32 kernel. Although the 2.6.32 kernel is well supported 
in compat-wireless, the RHEL6 kernel is far from standard and over time 
it's divergence from the base 2.6.32 kernel grows as Red Hat backport 
more stuff into it.

Anyway, with release 3.3, compat-wireless added support for RHEL 6.2 and 
we released our package on that basis.

Subsequent compat-wireless releases (3.4, 3.5) were again broken on 
RHEL, and the release of RHEL 6.3 has broken our package due to the 
amount of new wireless support Red Hat has backported.

So where does this leave us?

Firstly, folks should try uninstalling kmod-compat-wireless on 6.3 and 
see if the new wireless features in 6.3 supports your device. If the 6.3 
kernel supports your device then you should use that.

Secondly, I have now managed to patch our original package based on 
compat-wireless 3.3.2 sufficiently to get it to build on 6.3. Some 
drivers should work, but there are still a lot of drivers in the package 
that will be broken. The issue here is I see no warnings during build, 
only once I've built the package and attempt to load individual drivers 
- also keep in mind I don't have any wireless hardware to test these with.

So, if people are desperate I could release the semi-broken package I 
have and it might/might not work for you. If it doesn't work (and 
assuming it worked on 6.2), feel free to report it and I can then look 
at drivers on an individual basis.

I realise that all of this is far from ideal. This is not really our 
(elrepo's) problem. This needs to be fixed by the compat-wireless 
project but I suspect that fully supporting a moving target like the 
RHEL kernel is providing them with major headaches, and having tried to 
fix this myself I can appreciate just what a task it is for them!

So, if anyone is interested in running with this, let me know and I'll 
submit my patches to date to our github repo and get us started, but I'm 
not sure this is something I want to undertake by myself (some help 
would be nice!).

Otherwise we drop compat-wireless unless the compat-wireless project are 
able to sort out the issues supporting the RHEL kernel. To this end, 
I'll ping their email list and see what their long terms goals are.

Thanks,

Phil