On 2/4/07, Jouni Malinen <jkmaline@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I hope you realize that 802.11s is in very early steps (the first draft failed to get the needed approval rate in IEEE 802.11 working group) and is subject to change.. Whether hardware can run 802.11s (the current draft or whatever may end up in the end) is quite open question from my view point.. 802.11 requires MAC changes and I'm sure there are hardware designs that do not work with the current 802.11s draft no matter what the host CPU is doing in the driver/802.11 stack.
What I've read is that there are no changes at the PHY layers for 11s. If that is the case then any existing hardware should be able to run 11s if the interface allows properly formatted packets to be transmitted and received. Of course I don't know exactly what is in the 11s draft since it is secret. A related issue is merging the Marvell support for the OLPC. Marvell is doing a FullMAC 11s implementation which requires a coprocessor in the wireless hardware. Merging a firmware 11s implementation before a software 11s implementation exists will likely cause problems since interfaces won't get designed correctly. I'm concerned that's the vendor's goal is to require a new round of hardware purchases to support 11s when it doesn't appear to be necessary. OLPC needs the firmware implementation for power saving reasons, not to implement the protocol. -- Jon Smirl jonsmirl@xxxxxxxxx - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
