Updated Eee kernel to 2.6.27.6

I finally got a working Eee kernel built today with everything I was hoping to get into it. This includes the ath5k wireless driver from compat-wireless, meaning support for madwifi has officially been dropped as of this kernel release. To sum up all the changes:

• The ath5k wireless driver is now the preferred (and only) driver I will build for wireless support. The network interface is now labeled wlan0 instead of ath0, so you may need to update any configs accordingly. Not much else should need to change. This means we are down to no supplementary packages which makes building this kernel really easy for me.
• The shutdown issue with the soundcard has now been fixed in the kernel. This means you can remove any trickery you added in /etc/rc.local.shutdown.
• ipv6 is now provided as a module for those that requested it.
• uvesafb has been dropped as a built-in.

This release took a while because I was busy trying to track down a kernel bug (NULL pointer dereference) with the compat-wireless drivers. You can read the thread here if you are interested.

Edit: So the compat-wireless stuff didn’t seem to work at all. I could connect to a wireless network, DHCP worked, ping worked, but any other connections just died out (TCP only, perhaps?). I might investigate more, but for now, we’ll just go with the shipped ath5k driver that comes with the kernel source.

See Also

• 2.6.27.8 Eee kernel is out - December 7, 2008
• 2.6.27 kernel out for Eee - October 12, 2008
• Arch Eee Repository - April 1, 2008
• Eee Kernel resurrected - April 23, 2011
• Does anyone want to maintain the Eee kernel? - August 13, 2010