what does iwpriv do?

[Matt Price]

hi folks,

so, i have a faulty third-party wireless driver from realtek that causes
kernel panics on my ubuntu lucid machine.  The crash can be triggered
manually by running iwpriv -a as root; when running as a normal user, it
fails to trigger the crash. I include the output in my latest comment on the
bug report, here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/585938/comments/18 ;
it's pretty simple though really:

lo no private ioctls.
eth0 no private ioctls.
wlan0 Available read-only private ioctl :
wlan0 firm_ver:63
Kernel Panic [etc...]

here's my question:  how do i figure out what iwpriv is actually doing to
trigger this issue -- and is there anything i can do to stop this from
happening at othertimes?


Anyway, thanks as always to everyone, best,

Matt
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