Hi On 2015-05-11, Cyril Brulebois wrote: > Hello Stefan, > > Thanks for the write-up, I only had a vague idea of what usb-modeswitch > was, and it helped getting a clear view. [...] Just to add some further context. Device manufacturers can apply this modeswitching dance (supported by usb-modeswitch) to just about any USB device (-class), like scanners/ printers, projectors, smartphones, wlan cards, etc., but it's most common for 3g, wimax or LTE cards. Looking through usb-modeswitch-data, I can only identify about half a dozen USB IDs for USB wlan cards among its database (and none of them belonging to devices that are still on sale, well perhaps except for one (AVM FRITZ!WLAN Stick N v2, based on the Ralink RT5572 wireless chipset)). > [...] It's hard to say anything about a > potential usb-modeswitch addition (to jessie) without having the work > done in unstable already, but the extra udeb(s) are indeed somewhat > worrisome. [...] usb-modeswitch-data[1] would be required as well - or at least a tiny excerpt of its USB ID database (unfortunately one can't filter this for a specific device class, like wlan cards, automatically). So the potential udeb would either have to ship all USB IDs, or a handcrafted excerpt of wlan devices[2]. From a purely technical point of view, for the strict subset of already known wlan cards requiring modeswitching, it might also be possible to emulate usb-modeswitch by just using /usr/bin/eject (respectively busybox' corresponding eject applet) on the usb-storage device node. However this would be quite painful to maintain for Debian/ d-i, but the list of devices is small, currently not expected to grow (at least not significantly) and all of the known specimens appear to use StandardEject=1. I'm strongly recommending against this[3], but it might be possible to accomplish with some udev rules and a (likely) tiny shell script - or just executed manually[4] by the affected users. Regards Stefan Lippers-Hollmann [1] Or perhaps usb-modeswitch-data-packed [2] Or parse usb-modeswitch-data's USB ID database and cross reference those to the kernel modules - possible, but not pretty. [3] because of the maintenance effort required for a Debian-only workaround, something the upstream supported usb-modeswitch abstracts nicely. [4] "eject /dev/sdX" on a free tty, where X stands for the usb-storage device node provided by the wlan card in question.
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