On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 09:47 -0700, Michael Wu wrote: > On Wednesday 09 August 2006 00:57, Johannes Berg wrote: > > Please not, for now. We need someone pushing for fullmac features in > > d80211, we need those anyway for embedded systems that can't afford > > running all of it on the main CPU. While obviously Intel would benefit > > from doing this since a lot more d80211 features would come available, > > the greater good would be having a main-stream card that someone cares > > about and helps making d80211 full-mac capable. > > > It's not that hard to generate probe, authentication, and association frames, > and it isn't done frequently enough to stress any embedded system that can > run linux. Doing this would let 3945 take advantage of all the d80211 > features, so why not? > > What level of fullmac support are we talking about? True fullmac cards (as I > define them) do not need to use d80211. WE19 is all they need, to add > WPA/WPA2 support. The IPW cards have a particularly unique split between > firmware and host 802.11 duties which I haven't seen in any other cards. They > aren't quite fullmac enough to interface with WE directly, yet they only need > probe response handling to complete the picture. What other half-fullmac, > half-softmac card besides the other IPW cards splits card/host 802.11 duties > along those lines? What other splits between card and host are out there? I > would be very reluctant to make changes to the 802.11 stack to support > "fullmac" without evidence that other drivers need the change.
The atmel driver is somewhat of a hybrid. For fullmac cards like airo, you just set the connection info up, let the card go, and you get back a link event. But the atmel driver controls authentication and association stuff; that's not done in firmware. Look at: send_authentication_request() send_association_request() atmel_transmit_management_frame() atmel_management_frame() authenticate() associate() The driver has an auth/assoc state machine, receives management frames, and sends out the next appropriate management frame based on the current state. I think this is the reverse of ipw2100, where the firmware handles assoc/auth but not much else, but it's still less fullmac than airo, and more fullmac than softmac. Dan - 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
