RTL8187: RTL8187B with id 0bda:8198

Hi!

I am trying to get the wireless card on a Toshiba Satellite L350
to work. The laptop uses a RTL8187b chip but unfortunately with an id of 0bda:8198.
I have tried the RTL8187 driver in the 2.6.27-rc1 release.
To make the driver accept the card I had to add the productid 8198 to the driver.
Now the card is detected and seems to work. I can ping another computer on the network
but for some reason the network just stops working after about 6 seconds.
There are no errors in the kernel log and if I reconnect with "iwconfig wlan0 essid myNet" the card works again for another 6 seconds. I am starting to suspect that the RTL8187b has a watchdog timer like the RTL8181 that times out?
Does anybody have the datasheet for the RTL8187b?

Regards
Johan Henriksson

/proc/bus/usb/devices
-------------------------

T:  Bus=02 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=05 Cnt=01 Dev#=  2 Spd=480 MxCh= 0
D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1
P:  Vendor=0bda ProdID=8198 Rev= 2.00
S:  Manufacturer=Manufacturer_Realtek
S:  Product=RTL8187B_WLAN_Adapter
S:  SerialNumber=00e04c000001
C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=500mA
I:* If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 9 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=(none)
E:  Ad=83(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=04(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=05(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=06(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=07(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=89(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=0a(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=0b(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E:  Ad=0c(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms

kernel log
---------------------------

[   25.947358] rtl8187: 8187B chip detected. Support is EXPERIMENTAL, and could damage your
[   25.947363]          hardware, use at your own risk
[   25.958701] phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'pid'
[   26.044629] phy0: hwaddr 00:1b:9e:ff:f4:03, RTL8187BvE V0 + rtl8225z2
[   26.057455] usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8187
[   39.147086] wlan0: authenticate with AP 00:1b:2f:6b:48:4e
[   39.148826] wlan0: authenticated
[   39.148949] wlan0: associate with AP 00:1b:2f:6b:48:4e
[   39.151006] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:1b:2f:6b:48:4e (capab=0x431 status=0 aid=1)
[   39.151098] wlan0: associated

To quote the RealTek engineers, "The rtl8187B card with VID 8198 is only for Toshiba. But It is regrettable that we can't provide open source of that, because we have some agreements with Toshiba." All that they will say is that the part is different.

We have the data sheet for the RTL8187B, but I have seen nothing about a watchdog timer. I would send you the data sheet, but it is not clear that I have the right to do so. I'll explore that aspect separately.

Have you run this card with ndiswrapper? If so, you should be able to use usbmon to dump the traffic and find what is being sent to the chip by the Windows driver that the native driver does not. Perhaps a timer reset will be found that way.

The open-source RTL8187 driver is still very much a work in progress. We have a couple of patches on their way to mainline that you should try before you do much further work. I'll be sending them to you separately.

Larry

Thanks Larry for the help!
I have tried the patches and now it works better but the network still stops working after a while (and DNS lookup doesn't work at all?).

The question is how different the 8197 and 8198 are. They can't be totally incompatible
since the driver almost works?

Unfortunately I haven't got ndiswrapper to work with the card. I have tried the winxp driver
from toshiba, winxp driver from realtek and the win98 driver (forced) from realtek without success.
There are no error messages at all so I really do not know what the problem is.

/Johan