wireless/hotplug puzzle, 2.6.0

[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 things
now work well for the most part.

Except for 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 recognized at all.
Inserting and ejecting it produces no beeps and makes no lights flash.

`cardmgr ident' gives:

    Socket 0: no product info available

I spent a long time trying to persuade the pcmcia subsytem to notice
the existence of the card before realizing that this was not in fact a
cardmgr problem at all. In 2.6.0, these cards are handled by hotplug
and not by cardmgr. So now I'm trying to understand how hotplug should
be set up to handle events involving these cards.

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. /etc/network/interfaces:

   # For the wireless interface:
   #
   iface eth1 inet static
   address 192.168.93.2
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   broadcast 192.168.93.255
   gateway 192.168.93.3

   mapping hotplug
   script echo

But bringing up eth1 produces `No such device' errors.  I get this
error message when the hotplug subsystem is started:

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

This is the relevant part of lspci:

02:03.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI4410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02)

The kernel help for CONFIG_HOTPLUG_PCI says that the filesystem
pcihpfs must be mounted in order to interact with any PCI_HOTPLUG
controllers, but that is all it says, and even that seems to be out of
date since it seems from various kernel related mailings that pcihpfs
was replaced by sysfs at 2.5.something.

All a bit much for a mortal user. Does anyone know of any usable
documentation out there? Any pointers?

Thanks very much,

Jim