On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 15:37 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote: > I noticed that wireless patches are now in the mainline. That is good, > patches are getting smaller, but it is going to make future user > interface changes harder; and thats very bad.
Only a very early version of the ieee80211 header was included in 2.6.13. This header is not compatible with the ones needed to compile the current external drivers which depend on ieee80211. This makes it hard to properly support these external drivers for linux-2.6.13 for distributions such as Gentoo Linux. I'd rather have waited with the inclusion into mainline until the ieee80211 subsystem was more mature - but I guess that's another topic... > There are good reasons to have wireless interfaces as wlanX, with > tcpdump showing wireless packetes, etc; but current patches name it > ethX, and you get plain ethernet packets on tcpdump. Are we going to > keep showing wireless interfaces as ethernet ones forever, or do we > plan to switch to wlanX? If we decide to switch, we should either > switch before 2.6.14, or disable wireless before 2.6.14 so that we do > not confuse users too badly... I believe the Intel developers are working on a native IEEE 802.11 wireless stack for the Linux kernel, which will (should?) also change the naming scheme of the interfaces from ethX to wlanX. As it is now, the ieee80211 subsystem is just an "add-on" to the ethernet stack, and interfaces are thus correctly (imho) named ethX. I am in favor of switching to the new naming scheme once the native stack is a reality, and I therefore also think we should have the immature version of the ieee80211 subsystem removed before linux-2.6.14 to avoid confusion - not only among end-users, but also among wireless developers. Currently (as of linux-2.6.13) the only in-kernel driver relying on the in-kernel ieee80211 header is the orinoco driver, which can easily be modified not to. Sincerely, Brix -- Henrik Brix Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Gentoo Metadistribution | Mobile computing herd
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