Hi all ! This mail is an attempt to get some feedback about the way we should go :-) "We" are several people interested in 802.11bg cards in Compact-Flash format with an Marvell 8385 (AFAIK) chip. See the list of people at http://projects.linuxtogo.org/projects/marvell8385/ A driver for this cards would be quite nice for PDAs and other embedded Linux systems. Two months ago I sent an e-mail to Marvell for support, or at least to put me in contact with the product manager. There was no response. Maybe they don't care for sales. However, Marvell released a GPL driver for the OLPC project, which is now in Linux mainline. This driver is for a different chip (8388 AFAIK), a different firmware (with Mesh capability) and a different host interface (USB). During the last month the libertas driver got rid of more and more code that applied to non-8388, non-USB, non-mesh-firmware versions of the Libertas chip set family. Those cleanups made the in-kernel libertas driver more and more unusable for the cards that I have in mind. They did not only clean up, they also added their specific stuff for their mesh solution. I think the biggest problem here is the firmware. The OLPC people have a special firmware for their USB dongle, which is not used in other chips, so a driver that has been heavily adapted to this firmware isn't easy to mangle to a different firmware. Fortunately, because of the involvement of Marvell into the OLPC project, they posted in a public mailing list reference documenentation about their firmware ! :-) So, what I (and several other people, see want to take the OLPC driver, get rid of the USB stuff, add in back stuff that is needed for CF-Card, add mangle and treat this until we get something that is working. Now, linux-2.6.20 still has Softmac. Some projects, like the bcm43xx, are very lively in the softwac area. d80211 is supposed to come into the kernel since months. I guess it's an endless task? Will it ever arive? What 80211 version should we use if our aim is inclusion in the stock kernel? We don't plan, like so many other project, divide our working time into a year-long maintainance of two 80211 versions. - 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
