Re: Wireless: One small step towards a more perfect union...?

From: Daniel Drake
Date: Wed Jan 11 2006 - 17:27:36 EST


John W. Linville wrote:
If you are the maintainer of an out-of-tree driver or other component
(e.g. softmac), please let me hear from you (publicly or privately).
I want to be sure to identify all the major stakeholders. I would
also like to hear your plans for getting your code into the tree... :-)

Thanks for stepping up for this role - I'm sure it will help the situation improve. Here's some info about an out-of-tree driver for you:

ZD1211.

These are USB 2.0 wireless adapters, there are about 20 available on the market, all branded differently.

There is a GPL driver available from ZyDAS (the manufacturer) but, well, you really don't want to see it. There have been projects come and go (zd1211.sf.net, zd1211.ath.cx) which try to make the ZyDAS driver more workable, but they restrict themselves to small unobtrusive patches, leaving the code still in a horrific state, not at all suited for kernel inclusion.

ZyDAS also made the device specs available to us, however they are somewhat inaccurate, almost as if they were written about another device altogether.

Myself and two others have recently started rewriting the driver:

http://zd1211.ath.cx/wiki/RoadmapForKernelInclusion

We're in very early stages but progress should be fairly quick once we have 'deciphered' more of the junk in the vendor driver.

Right now we will be using the ieee80211 wireless stack, for the simple reason that this is what is included in the kernel, and our top priority is inclusion ASAP.

FWIW, my opinion is that the devicescape code should be broken down and used to extend the existing stack, no matter how 'good' it is. The way it has been developed (i.e. totally outside of the ieee80211 stack) is somewhat insulting to our development process.

Daniel
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