"It doesn't seem to pull any dependency nor affect any other external piece of code unless I'm missing something, so it's a perfect example of what we've been discussing back then: there is just no point not merging it at any time right ? :-)" Benjamin Herrenschmidt summarized his request that the iwl4965 driver be merged into the 2.6.23 kernel late in the release cycle, outside of the standard two week merge window. John Linville answered, "it is queued for 2.6.24. I'm not even sure it was originally posted in time for the 2.6.23 merge window, but even if it was there was a lot of opposition to merging it until fairly recently. In fact, I'm sure there are still some wireless developers that are less than happy about merging it now." When asked what the opposition was about, he referred to a discussion on the netdev mailing list and explained:

"There have been a lot of spats about how functionality has been partitioned between the driver and the firmware, issues with how the driver tries to do things that either ought to be in mac80211 or not done at all, and some random complaints about ugliness like '#include "../../../net/mac80211/blah.h"', etc. There is still plenty of work to be done on this driver, but as you point out we are better-off with it in the kernel than with it out."

James Ketrenos announced a new 80211 based driver for the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG network connection adapter, "this new driver uses the new d80211 subsystem previously only available as part of the wireless-dev tree." An earlier incarnation of the driver code was much criticized for its inclusion of a userland binary-only daemon [story], prompting the OpenBSD project to create their own blob-free driver for the card [story]. "The [new] iwlwifi driver for the 3945 does not require the user space daemon, but does require a new microcode image," James explained, "over the past year we were able to make the necessary changes to the microcode used with the 3945 such that we were able to remove the regulatory daemon."

When the question was asked if the driver was going to be pushed for inclusion into the mainline kernel it was noted, "hmmm...I think we need to spend a cycle or so in -mm. 2.6.22 seems more likely for mainline." Pavel Roskin suggested, "iwlwifi is surprisingly good for a just announced driver. It worked for me from the first attempt, and that's the first d80211 driver to do so. In my opinion, it should go to wireless-dev as soon as possible so it can go to -mm together with other drivers."