On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 01:40 -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Michael Buesch wrote: > > To heavily reduce maintainance burden I would like to see d80211 > > going mainline as soon as possible, so that we can feature-freeze > > the softmac port of bcm43xx and reduce maintainance to next to zero > > there. So if people want freaky features, we simply point them > > to the d80211 port, which would coexist in mainline. > > > > d80211 in mainline would clearly marked as experimental, for sure. > > Notes must be added for possibly breaking usermode interfaces. > > > Does it have active maintainers? > > The DeviceScape people seem to have disappeared for months, except for a > rare appearance recently by Jouni. > > Did anyone ever come up with a list of why d80211 is superior?
For one, it's got a _much_ more flexible device model than the current hostap/ipw-based stack, more like the net80211 stack for Atheros/madwifi. I think that's one of the main benefits. i.e., you can have the d80211 cards be any combination of [AP | client | wds? ] at any given time. Think of a repeater node, which is both an AP and client at the same time, all with one card. That's one of the things a lot of people like about net80211. Secondly, DS is also working hard on moving a lot of the higher-level processing to user space. Management frames and other more complex operations will eventually be pushed up to a fused wpa_supplicant +hostapd running in user space, which should (a) reduce the amount of kernel driver code, (b) increase flexibility of configuration, and (c) make any kernel API/ABI/etc much smaller since you don't have to push so much configuration down into the kernel itself. That's a start (please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this). Dan > What are the remaining d80211 issues? > > Jeff > > > - > 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 - 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
