Hi all, I have some reasonably drastic net80211 stack changes planned over the next few months which require some driver work to make happen. The specific big change is to call net80211 for each mbuf transmit completion so it can kick-start the next transmit from a software staging queue. Since this has to happen outside of any driver lock context, it can get a bit hairy.
I'm going to do it for the following NICs as I have enough hardware to cover them: * ath (obviously) * iwn * wpi * ipw, if I can find the 2200 series NIC * iwi - same deal, if I can find the hardware * mwl If I can find a bwi and bwn NIC that works enough for basic traffic testing, I'll also do those NICs. There's a reasonably active group of people who (especially using USB wifi NICs) that I plan on enlisting to help me test those drivers. However, I can't test wi - the lucent/orinoco driver. Some changes were made a few years ago that changed the encapsulation frame format from 802.3 to 802.11 and this only seems to work on a very narrow, specific set of NICs and firmware. I have a _big_ collection of wi hardware and _I_ can't get it to work. I started hacking on it in 2011 and quickly realised that although I could likely back out the 802.3 -> 802.11 encapsulation changes so things work with a wider variety of NICs, I don't really want to. So, I'm going to disconnect wi(4) from the build in a week's time and shortly after I'm going to nuke it from the repository. As far as I'm aware no-one has actively used it in a number of years. Now - if someone wants to step up and claim ownership of the driver - then fix it to go _back_ to the 802.3 frame format and then make it work again, I'll be very happy. Sorry. I'd love to claim we still support wi(4) but the truth is that it's been broken since before I became wireless maintainer and it doesn't look like it's ever going to get better. Thanks, -adrian _______________________________________________ freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-wireless To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-wireless-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
