There is great noise in the media since the new kernel has been released. The new features are told to be the killer. Well… amazing… but is the new kernel already useable? I had to face that question a few times today. The new wlan stack is causing headache to me as the old drivers for my ipw3945 would not work anymore – but there are already new ones available for the new stack: the iwlwifi drivers. To find out if those are working for me, I am just building the new kernel. The following options are required for wlan operation:

• CONFIG_MAC80211
• CONFIG_CFG80211
• CONFIG_WLAN_80211

Problems so far:

• The btrfs module refuses to load and complains about an incompatible module format, even if recompiled -> Solution: Boot the new kernel and recompile the module
• No WLAN device -> Solution: flip that dammed RF kill switchto enable wlan

My Laptop here runs fine with the new kernel so far. Things that helped me here were google and the sunrise overlay of the gentoo community.