Subject: Re: [0/5] Improvements to the ieee80211 layer

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 23:18:31 -0400

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