Refuse to give up trying to get Intel Centrinio 6205 to work with GENMAC

[jkrim]

I have tried almost everything to get the Intel Centrino 6205 Wireless to work.  The files in GENMU load find, but the radio appears to not be enabled which of course means it doesn't work.    I have tried the .sys and .reg file extracted from booting the Hiren's Mini XP CD.  I know that some people have said that having too large a .sys file causes heartache for GENMAC, but the file was not terribly large.  I also tried one from Windows Vista which is also not too large but it hangs at the netbind.exe with a message "Exception = C0000005 occurred at EIP = 2268a".   No idea what this means.  I have also been able with various combos of .sys and .reg or .inf to boot to the eCS deskop where it hangs momentarily with the mouse icon busy before rebooting the system.  One question I have is that looking at the hardware manager, it appears that the IRQs for the hard drive are 10 and 11.  And, the IRQ for the Intel Centrino 6205 is also 10.  Is this a problem?   Any other thoughts regarding this problem appreciated.

[Doug Bissett]

The files in GENMU load find, but the radio appears to not be enabled which of course means it doesn't work.

From what I have been able to determine, some (many) machines use an additional driver to control ACPI for radio power control (which seems to be completely separate from the WiFi indicator). We have no such thing. It should be possible, if somebody can figure out how to do it. This has nothing to do with GENMAC, it is XWLAN that does power control, when it knows how.

I know that some people have said that having too large a .sys file causes heartache for GENMAC

What you describe is typical of what happens when the GENMAC internals are overwritten by something in the driver. The size of the driver has nothing to do with that. It is something that the driver does dynamically (probably creating buffers).

but it hangs at the netbind.exe with a message "Exception = C0000005 occurred at EIP = 2268a".   No idea what this means.

I think that is what happens when a program tries to use memory outside of what was allocated. GENMAC does not allocate sufficient memory for that driver.

One question I have is that looking at the hardware manager, it appears that the IRQs for the hard drive are 10 and 11.  And, the IRQ for the Intel Centrino 6205 is also 10.  Is this a problem?   Any other thoughts regarding this problem appreciated.

No, that is not a problem. It does indicate that you are not using ACPI though.

You are fighting a battle, that has been lost many times before. GENMAC is just not capable of running that windows driver, in it's present form. We do not have the source, and it has been specifically stated, that it is not allowed to reverse engineer the program to try to fix the problems (it has been tried, with little success).

Today, we have two options: 1) Wait for Arca Noae to finish their WiFi driver. 2) Use a travel router, connected to the wired  NIC. I do know, that Arca Noae is still working on the WiFi driver, but other things are more important so it doesn't get the attention that it needs. Travel routers are not that expensive, and they can be used for other things.

[Ibrahim Hakeem]

Just wanted to toss in my 2 cents here. If you end up going the route of using a travel router, look at the Netgear Nighthawk MR1100. It's a really nifty battery powered setup which I used with my T450S all the time.

[jkrim]

When I could get to the desktop without a crash or reboot, as soon as I attempted to open the XWLAN monitor the system crashed.  I remember getting a TRAP 000E screen, so that verifies perhaps the problem that was stated regarding XWLAN's power control.

[Andi B.]

When I could get to the desktop without a crash or reboot, as soon as I attempted to open the XWLAN monitor the system crashed.  I remember getting a TRAP 000E screen, so that verifies perhaps the problem that was stated regarding XWLAN's power control.

Don't think so.

IIRC trap000E is double fault. Something which happen with genmac sometimes. Guess you've followed all the genmac instructions, did you? I think it is important to have helperw.sys () near the top of config.sys.

If you can boot to desktop I would suggest you try the programs in the genmac folder. IIRC there's a ssid.exe and some others. Probably one of them triggers the trap in genmac too.

[Tom]

IIRC trap000E is double fault.

Trap E is a Page fault . A double fault is trap 8.

[jkrim]

When I was able to get to the desktop without crashing, I tried to run the scan.exe.  The system crashed with 2 screens.  The first one cleared so fast I couldn't see it to the second one which didbn't have a TRAP message as I recall.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

See ?:\POPUPLOG.OS2.

[jkrim]

From popuplog.os2:

02-06-2022  15:50:57  SYS3171  PID 0003  TID 0001  Slot 000b
D:\OS2\F32CHK.EXE
c0000005
1ffe5db3
P1=00000008  P2=00000014  P3=XXXXXXXX  P4=XXXXXXXX 
EAX=00000000  EBX=00000000  ECX=00000000  EDX=00000000
ESI=00000000  EDI=00000000 
DS=0000  DSACC=****  DSLIM=******** 
ES=0000  ESACC=****  ESLIM=******** 
FS=150b  FSACC=00f3  FSLIM=00000030
GS=0000  GSACC=****  GSLIM=********
CS:EIP=fff7:00005db3  CSACC=00df  CSLIM=0000e4ff
SS:ESP=0017:00005d0e  SSACC=****  SSLIM=********
EBP=00000000  FLG=00010212

DOSCALL1.DLL 0004:00005db3

[Neil Waldhauer]

The OS/2 side might be looking in the wrong place.

Can you get the source code for the Win32 driver? That would be easy to build in Visual Studio, and then the Windows driver could be customized to use only the subset of Win32 that GenMac supports.

[jkrim]

I don't think I can get the source code for the Windows driver but I don't know exactly where this would be.  As I said before,  I grabbed the NETwNx32.sys file from the Hiren's boot CD (Mini XP) used on the same system as the eCS install.  It worked to enable the Intel Centrino 6205 unders Win XP and allow internet access so I attempted to use it in eCS, but it crashes either hanging at the netbind.exe or as per this thread getting to the desktop and clicking on almost any app (Firefox, scan.exe, wlanstat.exe etc).