ThinkBuntu
July 10th, 2007, 02:07 PM
I know that many wireless users in here depend on the Madwifi drivers for connectivity, and I'm curious as to how the updated kernel will affect wireless support both on the part of the madwifi team, and for hardware in general. Will Madwifi need to be rebuilt to take advantage of the new stack? Will it work in the meantime? And answer any other interesting questions you wish I asked :^)
The biggest change for most users will be the new software stack. As Torvalds writes in the changelog, "For too many years, Linux wireless support has worked, but not very well. 2.6.22 has a completely new, better wireless stack included. This new wireless stack has been donated by the known Wi-Fi specialist company Devicescape.
This new wireless stack includes a complete software MAC (Media Access Control ) implementation, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), a 'link-layer' bridging module, hostapd, QoS (Quality of Service) support to prioritize things like VOIP (voice over IP), 802.11g support and full debug capabilities.
"All of this comes in a single implementation that drivers can use without rewriting those features themselves, which sadly has been done multiple times in the Linux Wi-Fi world," Torvalds wrote.
This new stack also has a completely new user interface. "The old stacks have an ugly ioctl-based interface, which was standardized under the name of "wireless extensions" (wext). The new interface uses a netlink-based interface, suited for the needs of desktop-based configuration interfaces, but retaining at the same time userspace compatibility with the old interface," wrote Torvalds .
The problem with all this is that there's a lack of older Wi-Fi device drivers that aren't compatible with this stack. The good news is that Torvalds thinks it shouldn't be much trouble porting older device drivers "since the new stack is actually a much better ground to build drivers upon than the current mess. There are quite a lot of new and ported drivers that are already using the new stack which have not been merged in this release, but will get merged in future releases, like the RT2x00 drivers, the bcm43xx driver, zd1211rw, adm8211, rtl818x, Intel iwlwifi (ipw3945 and ipw4965). Distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora already are using them."
In the long run, of course, the big advantage is that it will be much easier to port Wi-Fi devices to Linux, and they'll be much full-featured since the new stack already has so much functionality already built into it.
The biggest change for most users will be the new software stack. As Torvalds writes in the changelog, "For too many years, Linux wireless support has worked, but not very well. 2.6.22 has a completely new, better wireless stack included. This new wireless stack has been donated by the known Wi-Fi specialist company Devicescape.
This new wireless stack includes a complete software MAC (Media Access Control ) implementation, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), a 'link-layer' bridging module, hostapd, QoS (Quality of Service) support to prioritize things like VOIP (voice over IP), 802.11g support and full debug capabilities.
"All of this comes in a single implementation that drivers can use without rewriting those features themselves, which sadly has been done multiple times in the Linux Wi-Fi world," Torvalds wrote.
This new stack also has a completely new user interface. "The old stacks have an ugly ioctl-based interface, which was standardized under the name of "wireless extensions" (wext). The new interface uses a netlink-based interface, suited for the needs of desktop-based configuration interfaces, but retaining at the same time userspace compatibility with the old interface," wrote Torvalds .
The problem with all this is that there's a lack of older Wi-Fi device drivers that aren't compatible with this stack. The good news is that Torvalds thinks it shouldn't be much trouble porting older device drivers "since the new stack is actually a much better ground to build drivers upon than the current mess. There are quite a lot of new and ported drivers that are already using the new stack which have not been merged in this release, but will get merged in future releases, like the RT2x00 drivers, the bcm43xx driver, zd1211rw, adm8211, rtl818x, Intel iwlwifi (ipw3945 and ipw4965). Distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora already are using them."
In the long run, of course, the big advantage is that it will be much easier to port Wi-Fi devices to Linux, and they'll be much full-featured since the new stack already has so much functionality already built into it.