| Easy WiFi for Linux will come... someday |
May 04, 2006
Don't you wish you could just put Linux on a laptop and the WiFi connection would just work?
I know I do. I'm pretty darn good at getting WiFi to run with Linux. I know Madwifi, the drivers for the Atheros chipsets, well. And, I also have grown all too practiced at using NdisWrapper to use WiFi cards' Windows NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification) binary drivers in Linux.
It's always a pain, though.
So I was very interested in the news of Devicescape Software Inc. releasing its "Advanced Datapath" 802.11 driver stack as open source.
But, what exactly does this stack bring to the table?
We know that the driver includes an 802.11 stack with software MAC (media access controller), WEP and WPA security support, a "link-layer bridging module," and a QoS (quality of service) implementation. So far, so good.
The driver, in theory, will be able to support any flavor of 802.11 -- a, b, g, and come the day it's finally approved, n. The driver doesn't concern itself with those issues. It's up to the chipsets' hardware radios to deal with speed concerns. The driver is designed to control the radio hardware on the target device, not replace it.
That said, for now, it only supports 802.11b. 802.11g support is currently being worked on.
None-the-less, with its MAC support it can also work with chipsets, like Broadcom's, that require a software MAC. Indeed, Broadcom support has been successfully backported into an experimental Linux kernel.
According to Glenn Flinchbaugh, the company's VP of Marketing, the driver will also be able to support Atheros chipset-based WiFi devices out of the box. It should also be able to natively support Intel's IXP4xx chip family.
If the driver is implemented the way its creators want it to be, the driver kernel module, 80211.o, will be integrated as part of the Linux kernel.
It has currently been integrated into Linux's wireless networking stack maintainer, John Linville's, experimental Linux 2.6 kernel.
It is not, however, ready for prime-time yet. Before it can even be considered for the main Linux kernel, as Corbet noted in his LWN report, The 2006 Wireless Networking Summit, it will need to have its configuration changed so that it no longer requires /proc files.
While the Linux kernel uses process files to send information to and about processes from one part of the kernel to another, it is not used for device drivers.
There are also questions about how smart it would be to support two sets of code -- the Devicescape driver, and the already incorporated SoftMAC code, which is already in Linux and supports the Broadcom 43xx family and the Prisim54 family.
It's possible that both would be supported, but does anyone really want to support two different 802.11 stacks?
Of course, even if the new driver is implemented in Linux, some devices will still need low-level hardware-specific drivers to act as shims between the hardware and the driver.
Therefore, while the Devicescape's GPLed driver does promise to make Linux WiFi support easier, don't think for a moment that it will quickly make adding WiFi support to Linux a snap. Until WiFi device vendors start opening up their devices to open-source developers, Linux WiFi support will continue to be a sore spot.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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