Subject: Re: rtl8180 driver in master/ad-hoc mode

From: "John W. Linville" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:08:53 -0500

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 04:53:00PM +0200, Radu Potop wrote:

> 	I noticed that the rtl8180 (Realtek wireless PCI adapter) driver for 
> Linux doesn't support master or ad-hoc mode. However the rtl-wifi driver 
> from http://rtl-wifi.sourceforge.net does support these modes.
> 	After a bit of investigation, I found out that the driver from the 
> kernel is not maintained by its original author anymore (no changes since 
> 2007), while rtl-wifi development is active.

A bit too little investigation, it seems.  The rtl8180 driver doesn't
get lots of attention, but it has been hit several times since 2007.
As for master and ad-hoc modes, I've recently taken interest there
and expect to be adding patches shortly.

> 	My question is if rtl-wifi will make it into the kernel? rtl-wifi is 
> actually a fork of the old driver, but with a lot of added functionality. 
> I'm sure that a lot of folks would like to use their hardware to its full 
> potential.

No it will not.  For one, svn indicates rtl-wifi is nowhere near as
active as you indicate:

	/home/linville/svn/rtl-wifi
	[linville-t400.local]:> svn log
	------------------------------------------------------------------------
	r83 | falmouth | 2008-07-09 08:52:33 -0400 (Wed, 09 Jul 2008) | 1 line

	our CCMP, TKIP and WEP modules names end in -rtl

Beyond that, no one from there is posting any patches and in any case
it is rather rare to simply drop one more-or-less working driver in
favor of another one simply because it appears from nowhere.

Anyway, as I indicated I have been taking more interest in rtl8180
lately and I expect it to be greatly improved at least in time for
2.6.35 (since the 2.6.34 development cycle will be ending soon).

Hth!

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
[email-masked]			might be all we have.  Be ready.