On Tuesday, April 02, 2013 11:02:21 PM Larry Finger wrote: > On 04/02/2013 12:41 PM, Christian Lamparter wrote: > > On Tuesday, April 02, 2013 02:51:19 PM Juan Carlos Garza Fernandez wrote: > >> Now I have another question regarding the 8712 driver which has been > >> in staging forever. > >> > >> In your opinion, are there any chances that it will be improved to > >> reach the mainline level? > > Yes, r8712u has been in staging for a long time; however, it is not a matter of > improving it. For a new wireless driver to be included in the main wireless > directories, it must use mac80211. Making the change from the current softmac in > r8712u to a mac80211-based driver is essentially a complete rewrite., Oh, Joshua Roys had already investigated a mac80211 driver and abandoned it since it is not possible: "... Some differences from rtl8192se were eliminated, although all PHY/BB/RF reg commands are still commented out. *When any of those regs were accessed directly, the device would die*. When accessed through the IOCMD regs, the firmware on the device would seem to disable automatic control of some important functions causing a large drop in receive sensitivity and general performance." <http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=133644367402433> The driver can't initialize the PHY and while the firmware has a command to set the phy to a specified channel, you can't define the channel mode: whenever it is supposed to be legacy, HT20, HT40+ or HT40-... That's the reason why the new r92su now interfaces with cfg80211 instead of mac80211. The *su firmware really forces you to use the "high-level" commands it has for scan, connect, disconnect and join_ibss. (Furthermore, the scan/connect/... cmds also do the whole MLME work: probe, (de-)auth, (dis-/re-)assoc and action for BA... Unfortunately, mac80211 wants to do this a as well, so a mac80211 driver for rtl8192su would have to discard all the mgmt frames from mac80211?!) > As r8712u functions quite well in station mode, I have not felt inclined to > rework it for AP mode, particularly when a user can obtain a functioning > router/AP for about > $30. I feel that my time is better spent converting > the drivers for Realtek devices that are not currently in the kernel. That > list includes the rtl8723ae driver in 3.8, the rtl8188ee driver that will > be in 3.10, and 3 other drivers that I currently have on my todo list. Very true! (Is the RTL8812AU (Realtek's 11ac chip) also on the list?) Regards, Christian -- 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
