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

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 13:26 -0200, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:

On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 03:22:50AM -0500, John W. Linville wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 06:19:07PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:

quoted

Christoph Hellwig wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 01:00:47PM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:

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allows the 8388 to continue routing other laptops' packets over the mesh
*while the host CPU is asleep*.

We're not going to put a lot of junk into the kernel just because the OLPC
folks decide to do odd powermanagment schemes.

We're not going to ignore useful power management schemes just because 
they don't fit neatly into a pre-existing category.

I think the request to determine how all this maps into MLME is fair, 
though.

Definitely.  Also, I wonder if there was any attempt to evaluate how
the ieee80211 (or d80211) code might be extended in order to elimnate
the need for some of the libertas wlan_* files?

The regulatory domain structures, channel information (struct
ieee80211_channel), HW mode (struct ieee80211_hw_mode) compromised of
supported channels and rates, and probably a few others in the same
category. I can't see the possibility of using d80211 as it stands
(designed for softmac cards dealing with 802.11 packets to/from the OS).

However, it does not make any sense to use the structures defined by
d80211 if not effectively using it (we send/receive 802.3 frames to the
firmware, after all), IMO.

As discussed on this thread, there is a lot of code to be cleanup up,
but no structural changes AFAICT. Is there a general agreement on that,
now?

I pushed for a general "lib80211" sort of thing at the Summit, which I
think was agreed in principle with others like Intel.  We need something
to hold the bits that are common to d80211 and non-softmac drivers.
These include scan result handling, some bits of the regulatory stuff
(at least structures and definitions for allowed channels and txpower in
each domain), and 802.3 <-> 802.11 framing conversion code.  We should
be able to fold more stuff in there as we go along.  But there certainly
will be code that both softmac/d80211 and non-softmac drivers (airo,
ipw2x00, libertas, etc) can share.

Dan