Arch Linux

STiAT

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2004-12-23

Posts: 606

mac80211 in future Kernel releases?

Hmh, sounded quite interesting. There are plans on replacing the old wireless devicescape stack with mac80211 in the default kernel in future. As it seems, a patchset is already in the current -mm sources.

The current patchset seems to feature the following patches:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/ … mm-master/

The drivers of ipw3945 and some broadcom (bcm43xx? i dont know) already use this devicescape as i know.

Out of the mailinglists:

I've been threatening to do this for a while.  Since I've recently
pulled from everyone, the incoming patch rate is slow this week,
and we are getting close to being in -mm, now seems as good a time
as any to do it...

I've changed all references in wireless-dev from d80211 to mac80211
and from D80211 to MAC80211, including renaming files and directories
appropriately.  If you have outstanding patches, please account for
this change.  Filtering them through sed should do the job nicely:

        cat old.patch | sed -e 's/d80211/mac80211/g' \
                -e 's/D80211/MAC80211/g' > new.patch

I don't think it would have been appropriate to keep the old name,
with its veiled reference to its origin but no real meaning to the
uninitiated.  I think the mac80211 name is more indicative of the
component's function, and it matches the naming motif we are using
for cfg80211 and nl80211.

I apologize if this seems sudden, but I don't really think doing
it with a lot of warning would have been any better.  So, I made
the decision and did it.  Please don't complain unless it is just
unbearable for you. :-)

The patch has been pushed to wireless-dev, and hopefully will be
available by the time you read this.

Thanks,

John

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Ability is nothing without opportunity.