Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 27 May 2005 23:18:31 -0400 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | Re: [0/5] Improvements to the ieee80211 layer |
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Jiri Benc wrote: > The ieee80211 layer, now present in -mm, lacks many important features > (actually it's just a part of the ipw2100/ipw2200 driver; these cards do > a lot of the processing in the hardware/firmware and thus the layer > currently can not be used for simpler devices).
Agreed.
> This is the first series of patches that try to convert it to a generic > IEEE 802.11 layer, usable for most of today's wireless cards.
Great!
> The long term plan is: > - to implement a complete 802.11 stack in the kernel, making it easy to > write drivers for simple (cheap) devices > - to implement all of Ad-Hoc, AP and monitor modes in the layer, so it > will be easy to support them in the drivers > - to integrate Wireless Extensions to unify the kernel-userspace > interface of all the drivers > > This means that drivers for "stupid" (simple, cheap) cards should be > very short and easy to write, whereas drivers for "clever" cards will be > longer (but still shorter than they are now). > > We have a couple of cards for testing, and we gradually modify the > drivers for ipw2100 and ipw2200 with the development of the layer. When > the layer is mature enough for the "stupid" cards, we will rewrite the > driver for Atheros-based cards to use this layer. We plan to send all > the patches for these drivers to the netdev list. Of course, we are in > close contact with Pavel Machek, who is pushing the ipw2100 driver > upstream.
I'm interesting in writing a RealTek driver using ieee80211. As the ieee80211 layer matures, I'll start publishing that code.
Jeff
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