On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 06:01:24PM +0000, Johannes Berg wrote: > On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 12:43 -0500, Dan Williams wrote: > > > I said "mostly" fullmac. Sort of like ipw2100 (IIRC) is softmac but it > > does all the association stuff in firmware. It doesn't fit fullmac, but > > it's a lot more fullmac than atheros. There isn't any management frame > > processing, it doesn't do any data frame processing. > > Right. I hadn't looked at data frames but suspected this is the case. > > > The 8388 architecture is typical of a thick firmware architecture, where > > the firmware handles all 802.11 MAC management tasks. The host driver > > downloads standard 802.3 frames to the firmware to be transmitted over > > the link as 802.11 frames. > > > > I thought these 2 things were essentially _the_ definition of fullmac, > > please correct me if I'm wrong. > > Well we'll need more terms here. I had a short chat with Jouni and we > agree that what the Marvell card is doing is exposing the MLME > interface, and what d80211 is doing is implementing most of the MLME. > > I guess the thing I'm saying is that exposing the MLME interface which > changes fairly frequently is a bad thing and I'd love to have firmware > that exposes lower level stuff like . > > > Perhaps I just don't understand how flexible d80211 has become; when we > > last were talking about it 8 months ago, it appears that it could not > > handle parts that did significant pieces of work in firmware, like the > > 8388 does. Do we have the functionality in d80211 yet to handle pieces > > that are a full mix of hybrid full/soft mac? > > No, we don't have that yet, and we might never have. But I think I'm > starting to understand the issues at hand a bit better and it seems that > we'll need cfg80211 to be redefined.
So using the d80211 stack is completly out of question? Another detail is the way we deal with mesh networking: a separate device "mshX" is created, and that certainly does not fit d80211? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
