Hello! I believe the developers of Linux wireless drivers need a separate mailing list, preferably called linux-wireless at vger.kernel.org. I don't expect it to have heavy traffic, but there should be a definitive forum for discussing issues common for wireless drivers on Linux. I expect following topics to be discussed: Wireless Extensions. I highly respect Jean Tourrilhes who is doing this work. I believe that driver and userspace developers should use this forum to discuss their needs and to provide feedback to Jean. Handling of 802.11 frames. We may need common code to convert 802.11 frames to 802.3 and possibly other standards. Maybe some standards for 802.11 encapsulation and bridging could be discussed as well. Sniffing. We need a common standard how to pass raw frames and additional information to the userspace. There are several de facto standards, but the lack of communication between developers makes those standards less useful. For example, Prism2 headers were meant as highly extensible, but libpcap expects them to be of fixed size. It's an obvious failure to communicate the intentions of the standard. Encryption. There are wireless specific encryption issues. Host based WEP support needs RC4 cipher in the kernel. There's not much to discuss here, but the lack of RC4 in the kernel may indicate that Linux wireless developers are not acting together to make it happen. The patch does exist. Other interfaces between drivers and the userspace. There should be one place to discuss whether wireless drivers should be using netif_carrier_on/off, ethtool and mii-tool support. Again, there is not much to discuss, but it's much much worse if the same questions are discussed in different forums and every driver takes its own approach. I believe linux-net@vger.kernel.org is the right place to ask because Wireless almost inevitably assumes networking. I'll appreciate if somebody with enough weight in the kernel development supports this issue. Or at least please let me know where else I should ask and whose support I need to have. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
