Re: Plan for ath6kl cleanup

[Kalle Valo <kalle.valo@atheros.com>]

Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org> writes:

> Hi Kalle,

Hi Marcel,

>> We have been thinking about how to get ath6kl out from staging and get
>> it to a first class citizen under drivers/net/wireless. There's quite a
>> lot of work to do get ath6kl cleaned up and the prospect of doing all
>> that through the staging-next tree wasn't that exciting. We would be
>> sending hundreds of patches and it would take a long time to cleanup the
>> driver. And the disconnection from the wireless core development also
>> sounded very daunting (cfg80211 API changes etc.).
>
> my main question is why do you still bother with this driver and not
> re-write it as a mac80211 driver from scratch. It seems to be more
> softmac than fullmac anyway. Or am I mistaken here?

Actually ar6003, the chip ath6kl supports, is a fullmac. It can take
ethernet frames, all authentication/association frames are created by
the firmware and firmware manages the roaming as well. So there isn't
anything mac80211 could do.

> The source code of the current staging driver is 5 MB in size. That is
> by far the largest staging driver. Even brcm80211 is smaller.

Yeah, the driver is huge. But once the cleanup is done it will be a lot
smaller.

Kalle