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

[Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org>]

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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