On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 11:44 -0400, Darren Albers wrote: > On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 11:00 AM, John W. Linville > <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 10:57:05AM -0400, Tom Sutherland wrote: > >> Ran across this article today: > >> > >> http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/18/microsofts-virtual-wifi-will-make-windows-7-wireless-adapters-d/ > >> > >> > >> >From the article... > >> "The tech lets one piece of WiFi hardware be represented in Windows as > >> two separate adapters, meaning you can connect to two hotspots > >> simultaneously if you like, or turn your virtual device into an access > >> point that others can connect to." > >> > >> In the long term, would something like that be relevant to > >> networkmanager? > > > > You have to make it work in the kernel first... > > > > John > > -- > > John W. Linville Someday the world will need a hero, and you > > [email protected] might be all we have. Be ready. > > Don't some wireless drivers support this already with multiple > subinterfaces that correspond to a VLAN?
They dont' really correspond to a VLAN, they appear as separate "wiphy" (aka wireless phy) devices which can be configured separately. Note that by doing this "splitting", you're effectively time-sharing the adapter, and your transfer rate will go down by more than half, since the adapter has to be on one channel for 1/2 the time, and the other channel for the other 1/2 the time. It's actually more than 50% because there's channel switch time involved, and probably null-packet exchanges when jumping to a channel to notify the AP that you're coming back from sleep. Yes, it can work, and yes, some mac80211 drivers support this type of functionality, but something that *also* should be done is figuring out how to tell users that little Elves didn't magically replace the single radio in their wifi card with two separate radios, and about the inherent limitations thereof. You could of course do a STA + AP with the same card on the same channel, where for instance the STA was connected to an existing AP, and you were connection-sharing the traffic out over the your own just-created AP to friends or something. But of course there you'll also be increasing contention of the medium (since you're effectively broadcasting the same traffic on the same channel twice, once from friend -> you, then you -> real AP). There is no silver bullet here of course, unless you really do have two wifi cards in your machine. Dan _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
