Re: 802.11 status and futures
From: Sam Leffler (sam_at_errno.com)
Date: 09/04/05
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Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2005 10:01:44 -0700 To: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net>
Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Sep 2005 16:06:34 -0700
> Sam Leffler <sam@errno.com> wrote:
>
>
>>As soon as it's ok to have HEAD diverge I want to bring in an entirely
>>new framework for doing scanning. This supports things like background
>>scanning (scanning for ap's while associated), roaming, and enables
>>station mode power save operation. These changes affect all drivers so
>>committing them won't happen until I get help in updating and testing
>>other drivers.
>
>
> What kind of documentation is available? Is there an HOWTO, overview or
> bare-bone-demo-driver with explanations available or do we have to use
> the source?
>
> The gap between ath and the other drivers is getting larger and larger.
> I wanted to add WPA support to wi a while ago, but after 30 minutes of
> looking at the source and searching for documentation I still lacked
> the big picture (I know nothing about the internals, I'm just a poor
> user of 2 wi cards). Where to start, what feature can be implemented in
> software, which one needs what kind of hardware support, what needs to
> be implemented, what's optional, ...? I'm talking about documentation
> which goes beyond what the man-pages provide currently. Documentation
> which provides examples and/or teaches about how to write a driver. Do
> we have something like this?
The source code is the the place to learn about the net80211
functionality right now. If that's insufficient then I respond to
questions. Otherwise there are many resources on the web to use in
learning about wireless networking; the slides I referenced had many url's.
The ath driver is the best example to work from to understand how a wide
variety of features work. Some cards with more intelligence may require
some tweaks at the net80211 level (e.g. to disable functionality that is
implemented in the device).
For wi a good place to learn about what's needed for WPA is Jouni
Malinen's hostap driver for Linux. In general you need a way to defer
ap selection on scan to the host, send+receive WPA information elements
in 802.11 management frames and you need to be able to pass
host-encrypted data. None of these are especially difficult but for wi
are only supported by sta firmware revs >1.6 I believe. OTOH I
personally believe that devoting energy to legacy parts like wi is a
waste; people should be working on getting new devices like iwi, ipw,
ral, etc working well. All these devices have linux drivers from which
you can crib.
Sam
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- Previous message: Dmitry Pryanishnikov: "Re: kern/85503: panic: wrong dirclust using msdosfs in RELENG_6"
- In reply to: Alexander Leidinger: "Re: 802.11 status and futures"
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