Re: status wireless extensions API for new drivers

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 22:15 +0100, Bjorge Dijkstra wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have been working on adding support for RNDIS based USB wireless 

Quick question about these; does the firmware on the wireless device
itself talk RNDIS directly?  i.e., is RNDIS intended to replace all the
manufacturer-specific proprietary host<->adapter protocols?  How common
are the devices these days?  I trawled through CDW this weekend and
could only find one or two adapters (out of 30 or so) that were RNDIS.
I assume it's the wave of the Windows future though.

> devices[1]. Recently I've been getting some help from another developer 
> and the state of the driver has improved quite a bit. So we are thinking
> about getting it into the mainline kernel.
> We have used the Wireless Extensions API, but I get the impression that
> things are moving towards the cfg/nl80211 API's. Is it still acceptable
> for new drivers trying to get into mainline to use WEXT, or should we
> switch to the new API's?

Well, if you want to allow your driver to be backported at all, you'll
pretty much have to support WEXT.

_But_, since your driver doesn't have any need for backwards
compatibility requirements since it's not already upstream, you might
want to be the guinea pig for cfg80211/nl80211 :)  If you decided to
only support cfg80211, you'd get WEXT support since cfg80211 provides a
backwards compat solution for WEXT.  Plus you'd be helping out a great
deal by finding and fixing bugs in cfg80211/nl80211 and proving the
framework, which would be a great help.

Dan