[Written by Martin Diehl <lists@mdiehl.de>, modified by me]

> > > i've bought a irda-usb dongle MA620 and i can't get it work with
> > > kernel driver irda-usb.c - it's not supported. Does anybody have
> > > experince with this?

I don't have this hardware, but a few comments anyway:

1) Despite it's an USB device the MA620 has nothing to do with the
IrDA-USB class spec. Therefore irda-usb.c is not the right driver.

2) Reportedly the MA620 is made by glueing a SIR encoder+transceiver to a
pl2303 usb-to-rs232 bridge. Therefore the required setup is basically
irtty on top of the usbserial+pl2303 driver - maybe the device id's have
to be added to the pl2303 driver.

3) Furthermore it was also said the SIR silicon appears to be connected to
the pl2303 the same way which is used for the MA600 serial dongle.
Therefore the ma600 dongle protocol is needed on top of irtty.

4) With 2.4.x any setup with irtty (or similar drivers like ppp) on top of
usb-serial has severe problems (might sleep with spinlock held). To fix
this, backporting the usbserial from 2.6 would be required - which is
rather unlikely to happen AFAICS. Furthermore even with this fixed the old
irtty from 2.4.x has some potential locking issues wrt. tty and network
layer. In conclusion irtty over usb will not work with 2.4 - sorry!

5) In 2.6 the usbserial issue is fixed and we have the new irtty-sir
there. I know from my own 2.6-testing pl2303/usbserial/sir_dev/irtty-sir
are all working together happily with some supported serial dongle behind
an usb-to-rs232 bridge. Hence the remaining issue is to get the converted
ma600 dongle driver working. This should be pretty easy if the MA620
internal wiring is really the same as MA600 and someone with the hardware
would do the required testing.

6) You need to use irattach version 0.9.16-pre7 or later