On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 11:18:30PM +0200, Joerg Mayer wrote:
On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 08:40:59PM +0200, Jiri Benc wrote:
d80211 (aka DeviceScape stack) isn't stable yet. There are known locking problems (see f.e. http://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg13279.html), d80211 is known not to work with NetworkManager yet, user space tools for advanced features of d80211 need to be written.
We definitely won't have all of this fixed in time for 2.6.18.
Do you really mean 2.6.18 or 2.6.19? And while neither NM nor advanced features may be ready in time for the 10.2 release, even the basic functionality will quite likely be very welcome when compared to shipping a 10.2 without any support for these cards.
Some driver developers therefore perfer to use the DeviceScape stack.
There is a general consensus that new wireless drivers should use d80211.
... unless the card has very much intelligence inside: it doesn't look like the current ipw2100 and ipw2200 can be ported with a reasonable amount of work to the devicescape stack - the ipw3945 has already been ported by Intel (still waiting for the release).
Other drivers (like madwifi) even use their own stack implementation. The inhomogeneity of the wireless LAN drivers is a major drawback for us, but unfortunately it does not look like it will get better until we have a full featured ieee80211 stack in the mainline kernel every WLAN driver developer can live with.
I've been following the developemnt of the wireless stack for quite a while now, and wihle it looked like the (Intel based) current ieee stack would be the base for a future unified wireless stack, things have changed significantly and chances are really high that d80211 will be the future - there has even been the discussion on netdev to make the switch as early as 2.6.19 (that's why I wrote "might ... one release early").
So even if it isn't quite ready for prime time now, it looks like it is very close - and if it makes it into a 2.6.19rcX while 10.2 is still in beta, I'd like to see a backport going into the suse 10.2 kernel - that's what I was really aiming at.
I doubt we will do any backports. Just the plain release kernel + necessary patches. Ciao, Marcus --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org