Re: [PATCH] Marvell Libertas 8388 802.11b/g USB driver (v2)

On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:43:08 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:

The 8388 architecture is typical of a thick firmware architecture, where
the firmware handles all 802.11 MAC management tasks.  The host driver
downloads standard 802.3 frames to the firmware to be transmitted over
the link as 802.11 frames.

Ah. This isn't clear from the driver as it's too big to go through in
detail. In particular, handing 802.3 frames to the firmware means you
cannot use d80211 (nor ieee80211).

I thought these 2 things were essentially _the_ definition of fullmac,
please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think you're right.

Perhaps I just don't understand how flexible d80211 has become; when we
last were talking about it 8 months ago, it appears that it could not
handle parts that did significant pieces of work in firmware, like the
8388 does.  Do we have the functionality in d80211 yet to handle pieces
that are a full mix of hybrid full/soft mac?

No.

[...]
Not quite; the driver doesn't have to deal with the Open System
handshake or the Shared Key handshake.  Instead of Airo's 1-step
process, this is a simple 2-step process.  Look at wlan_join.c,
wlan_associate().  That's what happens; nothing more.

If everything is as simple as you wrote, why is the driver so
incredibly big? It's almost impossible to review it in a reasonable
time.

[...]
I think you may have gotten the wrong impression about the part due to
the cruft in the driver.  We'll clean that stuff out, like the
ENTER/LEAVE and a host of other junk.  But what we'd like is comments on
how to clean it up and what other people think should get re-arranged,
and maybe how it could be integrated with d80211 more.

It probably couldn't. But you could use cfg80211, at least.

2) How could we take advantage the region stuff and 802.11d code in
d80211?  I was also under the impression that the region code and
regulatory domain stuff was nowhere near decided on.  I believe there
are full sessions on this at the LWS II this weekend.

Yes. That's the reason why not inventing another solution is probably a
good idea.

Thanks,

 Jiri

-- 
Jiri Benc
SUSE Labs