Linux PCMCIA Card Services

I am having problems with the pcmcia system triggered by my upgrade from Red Hat 6.2 to 7.2.

I use an old pre-802.11 wireless card, the netwave. This worked fine in my old RH 6.2 setup with the netwave_cs driver that comes with the standard pcmcia-cs package. Under RH 7.2, it continues to work... but attempts to eject the card cause a kernel panic. Shutting down the computer also panics when init shuts down the pcmcia system.

I figured maybe this had something to do with the move to integrate the pcmcia service into the kernel. So I downloaded the latest kernel I could find (2.4.13) and the latest pcmcia-cs I could find (3.1.29) and tried to build a new kernel *without* the 2.4 in-kernel services,i.e. in the traditional out-of-kernel manner.

There's some text about this on the pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net page by David Hinds, but I've not been able to translate it into a working build. I did your basic "make xconfig" then tried (1) turning off pcmcia support and later (2) turning on pcmcia support but turning off the cardbus-support suboption. I then built & installed the kernel, then built & installed the pcmcia system. When I'd boot that combo, it'd come up, but I couldn't make pcmcia cards work (even really generic 3Com network cards, forget about my exotic netwave card). System log shows unhappy messages about /proc/devices having no pcmcia device, cardmgr would exit. I've tried lots of combinations; there may have been other failure modes, too.

One problem is that I don't really understand all this mess with the new yenta socket device. I can't find any interesting description of this thing. man -k yenta -- no help. Checking the kerneldocs -- nothing. Uhh... it has something to do with the kernel directly managing the pcmcia system. That's as much as I can determine.

I've also checked the pcmcia-cs message forums, no luck, though it's possible I missed something.

Could someone explain to me, in simple-minded & clear terms, how to take a current Red Hat install and then install on top of that a new kernel & pcmcia package with the in-kernel feature turned off? This will presumably involve setting config options on both the kernel & pcmcia build and possibly some frobbing of scripts in /etc.

Thanks!
-Olin