I've tried this myself and it seems there are other patches/backports needed from kernels 2.6.34 and later.

I am going to try some more.

Allright. Have you checked if the needed patches relate only to wireless/wl1251 and wireless/wl12xx modules or is there some more generic changes?

Following the porting section here:
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/..._older_kernels

There seems to be different functionality that starts in 2.6.34 that is needed for more advanced functions. I'm definitely not experienced with this stuff, just learning...

Anyway...

Where it says Kernel 2.6.36 and older I followed the first link for SDIO runtime PM support http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mmc/msg03966.html. I tried to find out what this patch is and couldn't see a git commit. There is a link to a wizery.com for git sources, but the link doesn't work. However, going to http://wizery.com/kernel.php shows where this committer's patches ended up in the kernel git.

You'll see various commit messages there including this one:
I went ahead and did a git reset to that commit and checked the Makefile for the kernel version and it is 2.6.38-rc1. This leads me to believe that AP mode wasn't there until this release and/or that it may depend on non-module functionality/symbols in kernels up to that point. This seems to be the case with the references to sdio, mmc, and power management stuff mentioned in the list of patches in the porting to older kernels section of the wiki.

Another example is the Lenient generic runtime pm callbacks patch mentioned. This again seems to come from wizery.com as The kernel wiki page with a link to the mailing list submission here references a file drivers/base/power/generic_ops.c that doesn't exist until 2.6.34.

I verified this by going here,here, and hitting it here.
I'm beginning to wonder if getting the 2.6.34 kernel working on the N9 would be feasible at this point, but I have never gotten this deep.

Also, I tried to compile the TI code awhile back and kept running into problems with that version of compat-wireless posted there. The issues were all related to missing symbols in the 2.6.32 kernel but started appearing in 2.6.34.

So I managed to compile the latest Linux backports, but it causes a reboot loop on my N9. I'm now attempting to apply the patches mentioned at http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/wl12xx

I'm not experienced with this, so who knows if it will work or not. Anybody else experienced with backporting kernel functionality?

Not me, unfortunately, my N9 currently isn't even set-up right to play with the sort of stuff you are.

I've done some work on that

Usually when you get it to hang or reboot, the clues can be found from the console output. It's pretty easy to hook up to actually, you just need a cheap USB<->RS232 converter, something like this CP2102 module which cost under 2 euros on ebay.

When using it, an adapter is nice but you can do without, usually I just press the RX&GND pins on end of the RS232-cable to the phone connectors by hand and reboot the device... the contact is good enough to get the boot message so I know where it slips from the rails

How do you connect those leads to the N9? Where is the serial port?

The serial port pins (rather, square pads on the pcb edge) are visible when you take off the sim tray. GND and TX, the only pins you need when logging messages are the 2 rightmost pads nearer to edge. The RX pin which you only need if you want to type commands to the console is further inside the device, behind the TX pin.

There are schematics on the net, showing the pins, but now I am in a meeting so I cannot dig out them for you.

Awesome. I found the documentation. Thanks.

I have a USB to RS-232 DB9 Serial Adapter (Prolific PL2303HX Chipset).

Can I use this by connecting the appropriate pins to the DB9?