On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, John W. Linville wrote: > Can the in-kernel stack be saved? With the addition of softmac? > Is it possible to extend softmac to support virtual wlan devices? > If not, how do we proceed?
I don't think, that we can continue with the current model of the stacks. There appears a great variance in the HOST-device interfaces between WLAN devices of several vendors. The other problem is, that there is a difference depending on the bus the device is connected to. Register accesses in USB devices should be able to sleep. However the 80211 stacks I've seen so far have a fixed set of capabilities and do also assume, that at the driver layer everything can be done in atomic mode, which is only true for buses that support memory-mapping. In my point of view each stack layer must allow drivers to overwrite all entry-functions. Drivers could then do cherry-picking of the provided standard-functions. This is of course the library approach. The discussion about multiple stacks will then be muted, because we would have several stacks in the kernel and on the devices, which would have compatible interfaces. > Do we need to have both wireless-stable and wireless-devel kernels? > What about the suggestion of having both stacks in the kernel at once? > I'm not very excited about two in-kernel stacks. Still, consolidating > wireless drivers down to two stacks is probably better than what we > have now...? Either way, we would have to have general understanding > that at some point (not too far away), one of the stacks would have > to disappear. See above. -- Ulrich Kunitz - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
