Re: [Madwifi-devel] d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

Re: [Madwifi-devel] d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Kel Modderman]

On Wednesday 18 October 2006 10:14, David Kimdon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> DadWifi is a port of MadWifi to the d80211 stack.  It works now in
> managed and monitor mode, lightly tested.  Any card supported by
> MadWifi should be supported by DadWifi [1].  This allows a large
> number of cards to now take advantage of the d80211 stack.
>
> DadWifi uses the same (binary only) hal as MadWifi and reuses much of
> the initialization, descriptor and interrupt processing code.
>
> There is a subversion repository and mailing list available [2] for
> those wishing to try it out or help with development.

Any chance you would consider joining effort with the current MadWifi team and 
infrastructure (existing mailing lists, developers, subversion archive, bug 
tracking etc etc) at madwifi.org, or is this a strictly in-house or separate 
undertaking?

Thanks, Kel.

Re: d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 17:14:29 -0700
David Kimdon <david.kimdon@devicescape.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> DadWifi is a port of MadWifi to the d80211 stack.  It works now in
> managed and monitor mode, lightly tested.  Any card supported by
> MadWifi should be supported by DadWifi [1].  This allows a large
> number of cards to now take advantage of the d80211 stack.
> 
> DadWifi uses the same (binary only) hal as MadWifi and reuses much of
> the initialization, descriptor and interrupt processing code.
> 
> There is a subversion repository and mailing list available [2] for
> those wishing to try it out or help with development.
> 
> -David
> 
> 
> [1] : http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility
> [2] : https://devicescape.org/projects/dadwifi/

I would consider this a BAD thing. You are creating a derived work
out of GPL and non-GPL software. This actually will hurt the possible acceptance
of the d80211 stack into the mainline kernel.

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Re: d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 18:51 -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> I would consider this a BAD thing. You are creating a derived work
> out of GPL and non-GPL software. This actually will hurt the possible acceptance
> of the d80211 stack into the mainline kernel.

On the contrary, I think this effort with spur interest in d80211,
Atheros hardware and stimulate development of OpenHAL.  It will also put
additional pressure on Atheros to open HAL sources.

The technical ability of d80211 to handle a popular chipset would hardly
undermine its chances to be included into the kernel.  It takes more
that one step to achieve free in-kernel support for Atheros chipsets.
DadWifi may be one of those steps, OpenHAL or open-sourcing the Atheros
HAL would be the other.

If DadWifi succeeds at supplanting MadWifi, it will reduce the
proliferation of incompatible 802.11 stacks for Linux.  The FreeBSD
stack included in MadWifi will become obsolete.

There are many great ideas involving meshing networks that require
support at the 802.11 MAC layer because they are tied to the WDS
implementation.  Those efforts can be shared if the MAC layer is shared.
A company doing mesh networking on Atheros today could switch to
Broadcom tomorrow if Broadcom makes better chips, or vice versa.  
Users of DadWifi would contribute fixes that would affect users of other
chipsets.

Should d80211 be merged with the existing 802.11 stack in the kernel,
users of DadWifi would be among the testers, and they will ensure that
useful features of d80211 are not lost.

Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see absolutely anything
that could harm the chances of d80211 to make it to the mainline
kernel.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin

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Re: d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:26:00 -0400
Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 18:51 -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > I would consider this a BAD thing. You are creating a derived work
> > out of GPL and non-GPL software. This actually will hurt the possible acceptance
> > of the d80211 stack into the mainline kernel.
> 
> On the contrary, I think this effort with spur interest in d80211,
> Atheros hardware and stimulate development of OpenHAL.  It will also put
> additional pressure on Atheros to open HAL sources.

HAL's are bad as well. You want a real driver, not one that has multiple
layers of indirection.

> The technical ability of d80211 to handle a popular chipset would hardly
> undermine its chances to be included into the kernel.  It takes more
> that one step to achieve free in-kernel support for Atheros chipsets.
> DadWifi may be one of those steps, OpenHAL or open-sourcing the Atheros
> HAL would be the other.

If Atheros does open source their existing driver. Someone will need to
do a new driver that gets rid of the HAL layer.

> If DadWifi succeeds at supplanting MadWifi, it will reduce the
> proliferation of incompatible 802.11 stacks for Linux.  The FreeBSD
> stack included in MadWifi will become obsolete.
> 
> There are many great ideas involving meshing networks that require
> support at the 802.11 MAC layer because they are tied to the WDS
> implementation.  Those efforts can be shared if the MAC layer is shared.
> A company doing mesh networking on Atheros today could switch to
> Broadcom tomorrow if Broadcom makes better chips, or vice versa.  
> Users of DadWifi would contribute fixes that would affect users of other
> chipsets.
> 
> Should d80211 be merged with the existing 802.11 stack in the kernel,
> users of DadWifi would be among the testers, and they will ensure that
> useful features of d80211 are not lost.

As a test or transition vehicle it is a DadWifi is good, but hopefully it
won't slow the progress to a real open source solution

> Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see absolutely anything
> that could harm the chances of d80211 to make it to the mainline
> kernel.

Christoph et. all will insist that everything be EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.

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Re: [Madwifi-devel] d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Pavel Roskin]

On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 21:55 -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 18:51 -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > > I would consider this a BAD thing. You are creating a derived work
> > > out of GPL and non-GPL software. This actually will hurt the possible acceptance
> > > of the d80211 stack into the mainline kernel.
> > 
> > On the contrary, I think this effort with spur interest in d80211,
> > Atheros hardware and stimulate development of OpenHAL.  It will also put
> > additional pressure on Atheros to open HAL sources.
> 
> HAL's are bad as well. You want a real driver, not one that has multiple
> layers of indirection.

I think "dissolving" HAL once its open is much easier than porting the
driver from one 802.11 stack to another.  The former is just a matter of
moving functions around, making some of them inline, renaming constants,
fixing some ugly code.  It's a set of simple operations, each of which
keeps the driver functional.  If anything breaks, it's easy to track
back to the minor change that broke it.

Porting to another 802.11 stack is a quantum leap that can only be done
in one step and that could break lots of things at once.  It could also
reveal limitations of the new stack that need to be fixed.  It's so
commendable that somebody is trying to do the hardest part.

> > The technical ability of d80211 to handle a popular chipset would hardly
> > undermine its chances to be included into the kernel.  It takes more
> > that one step to achieve free in-kernel support for Atheros chipsets.
> > DadWifi may be one of those steps, OpenHAL or open-sourcing the Atheros
> > HAL would be the other.
> 
> If Atheros does open source their existing driver. Someone will need to
> do a new driver that gets rid of the HAL layer.

Yes, but this can be evolutionary.  Some code from HAL could actually
migrate into the kernel or to a userspace utility.  We still want
country-specific limitations, at least by default, so that users don't
break local regulations unknowingly.

And even if the complete rewrite is needed, d80211 will be prepared to
deal with Atheros cards, because the responsibilities of the firmware
and the host software won't change.

> > Should d80211 be merged with the existing 802.11 stack in the kernel,
> > users of DadWifi would be among the testers, and they will ensure that
> > useful features of d80211 are not lost.
> 
> As a test or transition vehicle it is a DadWifi is good, but hopefully it
> won't slow the progress to a real open source solution

I think it may speed things up.  Once the kernel integration is in
sight, OpenHAL developers would have a stronger motivation to produce a
working and copyright-clean product.

> > Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see absolutely anything
> > that could harm the chances of d80211 to make it to the mainline
> > kernel.
> 
> Christoph et. all will insist that everything be EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.

That shouldn't be an issue at all.  HAL does not and can not call any
Linux functions directly.  It can only communicate to the kernel through
a wrapper that will be under GPL.  Note that it's not circumvention of
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.  It's a direct consequence of the fact that HAL is
indeed not derived from Linux.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin

Re: d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 05:14:29PM -0700, David Kimdon wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> DadWifi is a port of MadWifi to the d80211 stack.  It works now in
> managed and monitor mode, lightly tested.  Any card supported by
> MadWifi should be supported by DadWifi [1].  This allows a large
> number of cards to now take advantage of the d80211 stack.
> 
> DadWifi uses the same (binary only) hal as MadWifi and reuses much of
> the initialization, descriptor and interrupt processing code.

Guys, why do you waste your time on doing stuff that's useless for most
of us, and that people can't even legally redistribute.

Please switch to openhal or the openbsd code and we all owe you a lot of
beer at the next conference :)


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Re: d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Jiri Benc]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:16:05 +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Guys, why do you waste your time on doing stuff that's useless for most
> of us, and that people can't even legally redistribute.

I dislike HAL too. But I don't think this effort is useless. It's a
great base for a future fully open Atheros driver - it's going to use
the d80211 stack anyway, so it can reuse most of the code of this
driver. It also allow us to make sure d80211 is capable of supporting
Atheros chipsets. I appreciate the effort.

AP mode support would be even greater thing - David, do you plan to add
it?

> Please switch to openhal or the openbsd code and we all owe you a lot of
> beer at the next conference :)

And what 802.11 stack would you use with it?

Thanks,

 Jiri

-- 
Jiri Benc
SUSE Labs

Re: [Madwifi-devel] d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Matt Brown]

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Christoph Hellwig wrote:

> Guys, why do you waste your time on doing stuff that's useless for most
> of us, and that people can't even legally redistribute.

Well that may be your opinion, but it's certainly not mine. We had just
discussed starting an in-house project to port the HAL to the d80211
stack when David made his announcement.

The reason? While we'd obviously prefer that the HAL didn't exist, if
it's going to exist we would far rather that it had a common 80211 stack
on top of it, so that we can easily switch to other chipsets and retain
the same featureset.

Reducing the number of 80211 stacks in use in Linux is a great thing.

> Please switch to openhal or the openbsd code and we all owe you a lot of
> beer at the next conference :)

I'll be very happy to provide beer for any devicescape employee I meet,
simply based on the initial release of dadwifi.

Cheers

--
Matt Brown
matt@mattb.net.nz
Mob +64 21 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz


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Re: d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Jim Thompson]

On Oct 18, 2006, at 3:18 PM, Matt Brown wrote:

> Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
>> Guys, why do you waste your time on doing stuff that's useless for  
>> most
>> of us, and that people can't even legally redistribute.
>
> Well that may be your opinion, but it's certainly not mine. We had  
> just
> discussed starting an in-house project to port the HAL to the d80211
> stack when David made his announcement.
>
> The reason? While we'd obviously prefer that the HAL didn't exist, if
> it's going to exist we would far rather that it had a common 80211  
> stack
> on top of it, so that we can easily switch to other chipsets and  
> retain
> the same featureset.
>
> Reducing the number of 80211 stacks in use in Linux is a great thing.

Of course, the net80211 stack in FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD is the only  
stack (as of 6.x, anyway),
and it supports ... multiple chipsets.

d80211 bought you nothing here.



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Re: d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[Matt Brown]

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Jim Thompson wrote:

> d80211 bought you nothing here.

Assuming we were able to move our development and production
environments to a BSD this might be true.

But for a plethora of reasons we use Linux and the costs of shifting to
 *BSD are far too high.

Given this scenario, for *us* standardising on d80211 via dadwifi
appears to be a very positive development.

--
Matt Brown
matt@mattb.net.nz
Mob +64 21 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz


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d80211: ANNOUNCE: DadWifi, a port of MadWifi to d80211

[David Kimdon]

Hi,

DadWifi is a port of MadWifi to the d80211 stack.  It works now in
managed and monitor mode, lightly tested.  Any card supported by
MadWifi should be supported by DadWifi [1].  This allows a large
number of cards to now take advantage of the d80211 stack.

DadWifi uses the same (binary only) hal as MadWifi and reuses much of
the initialization, descriptor and interrupt processing code.

There is a subversion repository and mailing list available [2] for
those wishing to try it out or help with development.

-David


[1] : http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility
[2] : https://devicescape.org/projects/dadwifi/