From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from viefep18-int.chello.at ([213.46.255.22]:39712 "EHLO viefep16-int.chello.at" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1761552AbXLMWFx (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:05:53 -0500 Message-ID: <4761ACC7.9050108@jooz.net> (sfid-20071213_220559_479160_9CD2A73A) Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:05:59 +0100 From: Bjorge Dijkstra MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Dan Williams CC: linux-wireless Subject: Re: status wireless extensions API for new drivers References: <4761A108.2080005@jooz.net> <1197581585.14270.26.camel@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <1197581585.14270.26.camel@localhost.localdomain> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Dan Williams wrote: > > 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? Yes, the devices themselves talk RNDIS. It's basically Windows NDIS driver API calls over a USB transport. What I have created is not much more than a layer that translates the WEXT calls to appropriate RNDIS messages to allow the device to be configured. The actual networking part is handled by rndis_host and usbnet. > 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. > I know of about 5 or 6 different devices and none of them are new, but they seem to be fairly popular. AFAIK all are based on the same broadcom 4320 chipset. > > 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. Well, regular WEXT is already more or less done, so I'd prefer to not throw that away :) I was just wondering about the current state of the wireless api's. > > Dan > regards, Bjorge