On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 06:12 -0400, Bernardo Innocenti wrote: > > There was an alternative libertas driver which uses the device in 'dumb' > > mode with the kernel's mac80211 stack. Coupled with mesh support in > > mac80211 that might make a somewhat suboptimal alternative to truly free > > firmware. > > Fascinating. This way at least we use a smaller portion of the closed > firmware. Where is this driver maintained?
'Maintained' is a bit of a strong word.... what we have is found at http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/libertas-dev/2007-August/000641.html > And is mesh networking really (going to be) supported in softmac? It's a safe bet that the mac80211 stack will grow 802.11s support at some point. It may well be useful for us to do it relatively soon. We could use _any_ Linux-supported softmac card to interact with the mesh that way. > I'd suggest whoever starts a firmware rewriting effort to go this > route, at least initially. So they can relay on known-good mac80211 > code while rewriting just a tiny low-level RF driver. s/known-good/debuggable/ -- and it might not require too many changes to the existing firmware. In the long run, softmac¹ definitely isn't the way to go for XO -- even if you switch it to being completely autonomous while the XO is off, you just don't want to be processing all the infrastructure stuff on the Geode. For _debugging_ generic mesh stuff, however, I suspect that's precisely how we want it. When it comes to time to thinking about Gen2... CSR have fullmac devices and a whole lot of Linux clue. Definitely worth investigating. -- dwmw2 ¹ by 'softmac' I mean the generic term -- a software MAC. Not the 'softmac' stack which Johannes wrote for use with bcm43xx. We're abandoning that and moving to mac80211 (née the DeviceScape stack). _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
