Uniformity of wireless drivers [LWN.net]

Uniformity of wireless drivers

Posted Dec 3, 2005 0:56 UTC (Sat) by proski (guest, #104)
In reply to: OSDL Desktop Architect meeting, Dec '05 by iabervon
Parent article: OSDL Desktop Architect meeting, Dec '05

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

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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.