On Dec 05, 2005, at 15:42, Jiri Benc wrote:
On Mon, 5 Dec 2005 21:23:42 +0100, Michael Buesch wrote:
This is __not__ "yet another stack". It is an _extension_. It is
all about management frames, which the in-kernel code does not
manage.
But this code should be part of the stack, as nearly every driver
needs it.
WRONG. More than half the currently Linux-compatible wireless cards
handle the wireless management packets in hardware, such that they're
little more complicated than a basic ethernet device with a channel,
an ESSID, and a list of MACs/APs.
Management handling should be really managed by the kernel.
Yes, but it might not need to be in the base stack if it's largely
functionally independent.
The hard part is that every driver will need a slightly different
amount of this support depending on the amount of features that are
provided by firmware.
s/firmware/hardware/g. This is _exactly_ why an external module
makes a lot of sense.
We tried the code from the RTL driver, but it is total crap. We
dropped it again. We thought about using yet another out of kernel
ieee80211 stack, but we began to write an extension to the in-
kernel code. If that was right or wrong, well, that's the question.
If you _really_ think we should have used $EXTERNAL_STACK, go and
patch the driver to work with it.
No. I just think we (everybody) should concentrate at one
particular stack, finish it and merge it. And I'm convinced Jouni's
stack is currently the best solution available - far far from
perfect, with many issues, but still the best - and it will finally
save as much time.
What you miss is that the kernel does _not_ go with the "rewrite it
and replace it" methodology. See Luben Toikov in the SAS flamewar
for another example. If a better stack exists, provide a nice clean
set of totally functional changes that convert the current one into
that one. In the process, we even get to keep the nice parts of the
current one that aren't in his (whatever they may be), and we always
have a working wireless stack. With the rewrite/replace solution,
you end up broken or unstable half the time.
Cheers,
Kyle Moffett
--
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible
-- Alan Kay
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