pcmcia wireless puzzle: 2.6.0/Debian testing/unstable

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

Hello. I recently hand-compiled and hand-installed kernel 2.6.0 on my
laptop, which runs mostly Debian testing, with some packages from
unstable.  There were a couple of adventures along the way, but almost
everything now works fine.

Except my PCMCIA wireless card. This is an Orinoco Gold and under
2.4.23 it runs just fine, using the hermes, orinoco, and orinoco_cs
kernel modules. It is correctly identified and woken up by cardmgr.

Under 2.6.0, the problem is that the card is not identified at all.
Inserting and ejecting it produces no beeps and makes no lights flash.

`cardmgr ident' gives:

    Socket 0: no product info available

Given that much, it is unsurprising that in /var/log/syslog we find:

Dec 23 10:28:37 lapdog cardmgr[330]: socket 0: Anonymous Memory
Dec 23 10:28:37 lapdog cardmgr[330]: executing: 'modprobe memory_cs'
Dec 23 10:28:37 lapdog cardmgr[330]: + FATAL: Module memory_cs not found.
Dec 23 10:28:37 lapdog cardmgr[330]: modprobe exited with status 1
Dec 23 10:28:37 lapdog cardmgr[330]: module /lib/modules/2.6.0/pcmcia/memory_cs.o not available
Dec 23 10:28:37 lapdog cardmgr[330]: bind 'memory_cs' to socket 0 failed: Invalid argument

It took me a while, though, to figure out that this was not in fact a
cardmgr problem. It seems that in 2.6.0 these cards are handled by
hotplug. I have hotplug support enabled in the kernel configuration:

CONFIG_HOTPLUG=y

#
# PCMCIA/CardBus support
#
CONFIG_PCMCIA=m
CONFIG_YENTA=m
CONFIG_CARDBUS=y
# CONFIG_I82092 is not set
# CONFIG_I82365 is not set
# CONFIG_TCIC is not set
CONFIG_PCMCIA_PROBE=y

#
# PCI Hotplug Support
#
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI=m
# CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_FAKE is not set
# CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_COMPAQ is not set
# CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_IBM is not set
# CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_ACPI is not set
# CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI_CPCI is not set

and I have the hotplug package from unstable.  But bringing up eth1
(the interface for the wireless card) produces `No such device'
errors.

I'm having a hard time finding documentation that would let me do the
necessary configuration of the hotplug package (or find out what
additional kernel options I need).  But presumably the fundamental
problem lies in this error-message:

   Starting hotplug subsystem: input pci*** can't synthesize pci
   hotplug events.

Could somebody direct me to some useful documentation? Any pointers?

Thanks very much,

Jim