From: Andreas Øye (aoy_at_running-it.net)
Date: 2002-05-31 18:03:15 UTC
On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 03:59:36PM -0700, Brad Colbert wrote:
> PCI question again.
>
> I would like to try to put more than one Demarc
> 100mW PCMCIA card into a PC as an AP. I want to do this
> on the PCI bus but I'm not sure if there are PCI/PCMCIA
> adapters that HostAP will work with.
It should work with any pci adapter supported in pcmcia_cs package, one of them being ricoh. But in my experience the ricoh card will not work in older pci buses. :/ irq_mode=0 is also a required option when using it. (In /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia on RedHat Linux, set PCIC_OPTS="irq_mode=0")
> I've seen that the PLX chipset is supported, but I don't
> know if there are any PLX based PCMCIA adapter cards
> or if this is even possible.
The PLX is supported but I haven't tested that with hostap yet, just the
linux-wlan-ng driver.
Technically the plx is a generic bus to pci interface chipset with none
of the functions of pcmcia. (I guess it's cheaper).
>
> I assume that the PCI/PCMCIA adapter cards do not need
> card services (which would be a nice thing).
The normal adapters like Ricoh needs the pcmcia socket services, The PLX card does not need socket services, but requires other drivers for support. So neither pcmcia nor pci drivers will work with these cards. Linux-wlan-ng and hostap both support plx cardadapters though.
> The Demarc card is said to work with a Ricoh chipset
> based adapter.
The ricoh adapter should probably work with most pcmcia cards. I don't know if it supports CardBus and both 3.3v and 5v cards, but someone else more knowledgeable than me, can probably say something useful here.
-- mvh. Andreas Øye aoy_at_running-it.net