On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:26:00 -0400 Pavel Roskin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello! > > On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 18:51 -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > > I would consider this a BAD thing. You are creating a derived work > > out of GPL and non-GPL software. This actually will hurt the possible > > acceptance > > of the d80211 stack into the mainline kernel. > > On the contrary, I think this effort with spur interest in d80211, > Atheros hardware and stimulate development of OpenHAL. It will also put > additional pressure on Atheros to open HAL sources. HAL's are bad as well. You want a real driver, not one that has multiple layers of indirection. > The technical ability of d80211 to handle a popular chipset would hardly > undermine its chances to be included into the kernel. It takes more > that one step to achieve free in-kernel support for Atheros chipsets. > DadWifi may be one of those steps, OpenHAL or open-sourcing the Atheros > HAL would be the other. If Atheros does open source their existing driver. Someone will need to do a new driver that gets rid of the HAL layer. > If DadWifi succeeds at supplanting MadWifi, it will reduce the > proliferation of incompatible 802.11 stacks for Linux. The FreeBSD > stack included in MadWifi will become obsolete. > > There are many great ideas involving meshing networks that require > support at the 802.11 MAC layer because they are tied to the WDS > implementation. Those efforts can be shared if the MAC layer is shared. > A company doing mesh networking on Atheros today could switch to > Broadcom tomorrow if Broadcom makes better chips, or vice versa. > Users of DadWifi would contribute fixes that would affect users of other > chipsets. > > Should d80211 be merged with the existing 802.11 stack in the kernel, > users of DadWifi would be among the testers, and they will ensure that > useful features of d80211 are not lost. As a test or transition vehicle it is a DadWifi is good, but hopefully it won't slow the progress to a real open source solution > Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see absolutely anything > that could harm the chances of d80211 to make it to the mainline > kernel. Christoph et. all will insist that everything be EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL. - 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
