OSDL Desktop Architect meeting, Dec '05 [LWN.net]

OSDL Desktop Architect meeting, Dec '05

Posted Dec 2, 2005 23:37 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: OSDL Desktop Architect meeting, Dec '05

Non-uniformity of wireless drivers is obviously a kernel issue, but it's also not something that only the desktop people would want. Sure, there are desktop people who care, and they're complaining in this case, but I'd guess that it would be an issue for anybody who actually uses wireless. Setting up wireless to get ssh going on a PDA with no keyboard is even more of a pain that what the desktop people are worried about, I bet.

I think it would be fine for the desktop to be seen as on top of the OS, so long as people recognize the obvious consequence that the OS has to have a suitable interface for programs like the desktop to use, which means that the kernel can't rely on users' ability to figure simple things out (which of these options is likely to be the WEP key?) and know what's going on (did I just mount or hotplug something?)

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Uniformity of wireless drivers

Posted Dec 3, 2005 0:56 UTC (Sat) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

Things are improving now. The generic 802.11 layer is in the kernel, and it has a homepage and a mailing list.

Uniformity of wireless drivers

Posted Dec 3, 2005 5:36 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Ya.. the generic 802.11 protocol stack is nice, most new drivers are going to be using it.

For instance the effort to support broadcom based on docs gathered from reversed engineered binary drivers are going to be using the generic protocol stack.

Also support for rt2400 and rt2500 usb/pci/minipci devices are being reworked to the generic 802.11 protocol stack even though open source drivers work fine (for x86 only though.. they seem to be windows ndis drivers ported to Linux and have many issues such as endian problems). Called rt2x00 btw.

The module is ieee80211 and once that is done it should make it much easier to support things like new encryption methods and make those changes aviable to as many devices as possible instead of having to go thru and update each and every driver.