On 9/27/07, David Murray <30179198@student.murdoch.edu.au> wrote:
quoted text
> Hi,
>
> The current open HAL looks similar to madwifi-old which I really liked
> but some of the features like background scanning are absent. I am
> interested to know how much of the code that was developed for the
> madwifi driver with the proprietary HAL will be reusable in the new
> OpenHAL version?

Any old legacy madwifi driver (which uses the proprietary HAL) relies
on net80211, with the exception of dadwifi-openahal. dadwifi-openhal
is now replaced though with ath5k [1]. ath5k uses the new Linux
mac80211[1]. Since net80211 is 'complete wireless stack' and mac80211
is a 'Linux API used to write SoftMAC wireless drivers' the drivers as
a whole differ significantly. As such only small portions of the
driver were reusable, and those that were made it into
ath5k_base.[ch].

quoted text
> Will the aim be to get the driver back to the same
> state or will there be large modifications with the added flexibility
> of an open source HAL. I hope this does not come across as critical
> because it is not intended to be.

New development is going to be focused on ath5k. Relying on the
proprietary HAL has been like working with a black box and the legacy
drivers also rely on Wireless-Extensions which will not longer have
new features added, preventing us from extending the usage and
features of the driver.

To reap benefits of the latest Linux wireless developments we must
focus on mac80211, cfg80211 [3] and nl80211 [4]. cfg80211 and nl80211
is still under development and we are yet to provide userspace
utilities for them. However, mac80211 is now part of the stock kernel
and as such we are working on stabilizing it. In the meantime I'd
advise users to look in to wpa_supplicant [5] and hostapd [6]. You can
also still use wireless-tools (iwconfig, iwlist, iwevent) with ath5k
and any mac80211 driver.

  Luis

[1] http://madwifi.org/wiki/About/ath5k
[2] http://linuxwireless.org/en/developers/mac80211
[3] http://linuxwireless.org/en/developers/cfg80211
[4] http://linuxwireless.org/en/developers/nl80211
[5] http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/
[6] http://hostap.epitest.fi/hostapd/

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