From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff Garzik Subject: Re: [0/5] Improvements to the ieee80211 layer Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 23:18:31 -0400 Message-ID: <4297E307.30707@pobox.com> References: <20050524150711.01632672@griffin.suse.cz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: NetDev , LKML , pavel@suse.cz Return-path: To: Jiri Benc In-Reply-To: <20050524150711.01632672@griffin.suse.cz> Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Jiri Benc wrote: > The ieee80211 layer, now present in -mm, lacks many important features > (actually it's just a part of the ipw2100/ipw2200 driver; these cards do > a lot of the processing in the hardware/firmware and thus the layer > currently can not be used for simpler devices). Agreed. > This is the first series of patches that try to convert it to a generic > IEEE 802.11 layer, usable for most of today's wireless cards. Great! > The long term plan is: > - to implement a complete 802.11 stack in the kernel, making it easy to > write drivers for simple (cheap) devices > - to implement all of Ad-Hoc, AP and monitor modes in the layer, so it > will be easy to support them in the drivers > - to integrate Wireless Extensions to unify the kernel-userspace > interface of all the drivers > > This means that drivers for "stupid" (simple, cheap) cards should be > very short and easy to write, whereas drivers for "clever" cards will be > longer (but still shorter than they are now). > > We have a couple of cards for testing, and we gradually modify the > drivers for ipw2100 and ipw2200 with the development of the layer. When > the layer is mature enough for the "stupid" cards, we will rewrite the > driver for Atheros-based cards to use this layer. We plan to send all > the patches for these drivers to the netdev list. Of course, we are in > close contact with Pavel Machek, who is pushing the ipw2100 driver > upstream. I'm interesting in writing a RealTek driver using ieee80211. As the ieee80211 layer matures, I'll start publishing that code. Jeff