Dan Williams wrote:
Quick question about these; does the firmware on the wireless device itself talk RNDIS directly? i.e., is RNDIS intended to replace all the manufacturer-specific proprietary host<->adapter protocols?
Yes, the devices themselves talk RNDIS. It's basically Windows NDIS driver API calls over a USB transport. What I have created is not much more than a layer that translates the WEXT calls to appropriate RNDIS messages to allow the device to be configured. The actual networking part is handled by rndis_host and usbnet.
How common are the devices these days? I trawled through CDW this weekend and could only find one or two adapters (out of 30 or so) that were RNDIS. I assume it's the wave of the Windows future though.
I know of about 5 or 6 different devices and none of them are new, but they seem to be fairly popular. AFAIK all are based on the same broadcom 4320 chipset.
Well, if you want to allow your driver to be backported at all, you'll pretty much have to support WEXT. _But_, since your driver doesn't have any need for backwards compatibility requirements since it's not already upstream, you might want to be the guinea pig for cfg80211/nl80211 :) If you decided to only support cfg80211, you'd get WEXT support since cfg80211 provides a backwards compat solution for WEXT. Plus you'd be helping out a great deal by finding and fixing bugs in cfg80211/nl80211 and proving the framework, which would be a great help.
Well, regular WEXT is already more or less done, so I'd prefer to not throw that away :) I was just wondering about the current state of the wireless api's.
Dan
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