Subject: Re: Broadcom 43xx first results

From: Joseph Jezak <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 13:38:37 -0500

> Why yet another attempt to write 802.11 stack? Sure, the one currently
 > in the kernel is unusable and everybody knows about it. But why not to
 > improve code opensourced by Devicescape some time ago instead of
 > inventing the wheel again and again? Yes, I know that code is not
 > perfect and needs a lot of work, but it is the best piece of code we
 > have available now. And it _does_ support WPA and such - in fact, it
 > is nearly complete.
 >
 > Please take a look at http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jbenc/

We're not writing an entire stack.  We're writing a layer that sits in 
between the current ieee80211 stack that's already present in the kernel 
and drivers that do not have a hardware MAC.  Since ieee80211 is already 
in use in the kernel today, this seemed like a natural and useful 
extension to the existing code.  I agree that it's somewhat wasteful to 
keep rewriting 802.11 stacks and we considered other options, but it 
seemed like a more logical choice to work with what was available and 
recommended than to use an external stack.

-Joe