[CUWiN-Dev] [mattw@seattlewireless.net: [Fwd: [Roofnet-hackers] Fwd: [Madwifi-users] future directions]]

[David Young]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2005 at 08:36:06PM -1000, Jim Thompson wrote:
> 
> On Feb 27, 2005, at 1:06 AM, David Young wrote:
> 
> >This e-mail (below) is making the rounds.  My own personal 
> >interpretation
> >is that Linux is 2-3 years behind [*] the BSDs in its generic 802.11
> >support, and it will remain so until Linux kernel developers get their
> >collective heads out of their collective asses, and pick up the 802.11
> >subsystem that is called 'net80211' in BSD.
> 
> Which they probably won't do for, oh, 2-3 years.   Until then, its work 
> with freebsd
> and/or netbsd, or stick to the drivers that already use net80211, or 
> (if you like that kind of thing)
> start re-writing drivers that don't use net80211.
> 
> The same virtualization should allow a single card to operate in 
> multiple modes.   Say,
> implement an "infrastructure" AP, as well as a WDS or adhoc link.   Or 
> multiple ad-hoc links,
> or 10s of WDS links.

Yup.  Virtualization is the low-cost way to do OPN.  And virtualization
may help some with multicast.

> Combine this with the channel-switching code from things like 
> OPN/MultiNet, and a little bit of
> scheduling (such that others don't attempt to send you frames while 
> you're off-channel), and real
> scalability can happen.

Yes, indeed.

> >[*] NetBSD is about a year behind FreeBSD---I haven't re-imported in
> >that long.  Today I spent 8+ hours merging the latest code from 
> >FreeBSD.
> >Work still remains.  It's going more smoothly than I expected!
> 
> You are a saint.  Where do I send the check?  :-)

Heh.  I'm in Google.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933