I haven't posted much in a while, except a few surly maintainer-ish remarks about changelogs and the like. So, I thought it would be good to say something about where I think things are going with wireless.
WHERE ARE WE? Those of you who have been keeping-up know that I have established a wireless-2.6 tree for pushing patches upstream, eventually to Linus. That tree has several branches. Some of them are for administrative purposes, others are for the mechanics involved w/ pushing patches. The important ones are the development branches for the softmac and dscape stacks. When I stepped-up to this job we were at a crossroads. In fact, we are basically still there. Many are dissatisfied with the capabilities of the ieee80211 stack which is currently in the kernel and want to switch to using the dscape stack (kindly provided by the folks at Devicescape). Others think that with the addition of the softmac component, the current stack still has some life in it. Still others have principled objections to switching stacks due either to objections to the development process of the dscape stack or to stability concerns and the like. Not a lot has changed. I would like to begin to break-up the logjam. WHERE ARE WE GOING? Most people's concerns about wireless boil down to "make it not suck" or "give us more drivers". I don't know how to solve the former concern in the immediate future. But, I think I can start to make progress on the latter. I would like to start merging the softmac code towards upstream ASAP. The ieee80211+softmac stack seems to be good enough to achieve basic functionality for a number of drivers. If we had softmac upstream today, there are at least three more drivers that would be available or on the horizon. The softmac code is an incremental improvement on the existing stack, and it was developed in an open process. It also is less disruptive to userland than the dscape stack. It is less capable than the dscape code, but I think it is good enough to make things better right now. I know I am running late on Linus' schedule for new stuff in 2.6.17. I'm not sure if we can get on that train or not. I don't think we will have any trouble getting in -mm. What I would like is to see some review of the softmac patches on netdev. The code is available on the softmac branch of wireless-2.6, and the individual patches are available here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/linville/wireless-2.6/softmac/ The patches for the softmac-based drivers are mixed-in to that directory -- please ignore the drivers for now. I will also post the softmac patches for review as follow-ups to this message. WHAT ABOUT DSCAPE? Does this mean that we have abandoned the dscape code? No. I think we need the capabilities provided by the dscape code as well. I just don't think we can make progress as quickly with the dscape code as we can this way. So what happens to dscape? I will publish a wireless-dev tree that will start life as a copy of the current dscape branch. This will provide a home for dscape-related development while allowing us more freedom to break things. Once we get things where we want them in wireless-dev, we can move pieces back to wireless-2.6. WHAT ABOUT WE-20? Jean Tourrilhes offered version 20 of the wireless extensions about a month ago. I was somewhat hesitant to merge the patch, since we are also talking about developing a new management interface for wireless. I didn't want to confuse things. But, realistically, we don't have any new management interface at this time. I don't see WE-20 as being such a disruptive change that eventually supplanting it with something new would be any harder or worse than supplanting WE-19 with the new thing. So, I plan to merge Jean's WE-20 patch to wireless-2.6 unless someone can offer a serious objection to doing so. Anyone? WRAP-UP I know some of you will object on the basis that we should wait for the wireless summit to make these decisions. I respect that view, but I think it will be better to already have this direction so as to provide a little more focus for the discussions at the summit. So, please give a good review to the patches I'll be posting as follow-ups to this message. Let's get things moving! John P.S. Please note that the following patches are already available on the softmac branch of wireless-2.6. This is a review request, _not_ a request to merge...thanks! -- John W. Linville [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 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
