# ndiswrapper in a read-only world?

## eccerr0r

Just wondering what people thought, this is probably something that needs to go upstream...

It seems ndiswrapper needs the disk to be read/write.  I have a Gentoo-built CF disk that I mount and boot read-only and have everything that needs to write, write on tmpfs.  However it seems that ndiswrapper will fail to load properly if I have the disk mounted readonly while modprobe ndiswrapper.ko.  The Netgear WPN111 just about gives no indication it's connected, though ndiswrapper -l will list the device as detected.

However, if I mount the disk r/w, the modprobe will work and the USB WLAN will get detected and initialize...

Weird... just a simple modprobe that needs to write to the disk... what???

Anyway... anyone run into this?

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## mikegpitt

Do you have /proc able to write in your tmpfs space?  From the ndiswrapper man page:

```
The module creates files in /proc/net/ndiswrapper that provide some useful information. These files are created so that they can be read only by root by default. If some other user needs to access these files without having to login as root, then replace <uid> with the user ID of that user.
```

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## eccerr0r

Very strange, thought files in /proc don't really exist in the root filesystem (and files in /proc change without it being r/w).

Well, been manually setting it to r/w to make it happy but not exactly what I want to do.  Oh well.

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## mikegpitt

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> Very strange, thought files in /proc don't really exist in the root filesystem (and files in /proc change without it being r/w).

 This I'm not sure about...  You might want to experiment and create a small rw partition and put your /proc there to see if the issue really is with ndiswrapper needing to write to /proc or something else.

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## Hu

In a normal system, /proc is a virtual filesystem and files in it do not exist.  However, depending on how your embedded system works, you might have ndiswrapper trying to write to /proc before that virtual filesystem gets mounted, in which case it is just another directory on your read-only root filesystem.

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