Marvell

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 06:12 -0400, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> > There was an alternative libertas driver which uses the device in 'dumb'
> > mode with the kernel's mac80211 stack. Coupled with mesh support in
> > mac80211 that might make a somewhat suboptimal alternative to truly free
> > firmware.
> 
> Fascinating.  This way at least we use a smaller portion of the closed
> firmware.  Where is this driver maintained?  

'Maintained' is a bit of a strong word.... what we have is found at
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/libertas-dev/2007-August/000641.html

> And is mesh networking really (going to be) supported in softmac?

It's a safe bet that the mac80211 stack will grow 802.11s support at
some point. It may well be useful for us to do it relatively soon. We
could use _any_ Linux-supported softmac card to interact with the mesh
that way.

> I'd suggest whoever starts a firmware rewriting effort to go this
> route, at least initially.  So they can relay on known-good mac80211
> code while rewriting just a tiny low-level RF driver.

s/known-good/debuggable/ -- and it might not require too many changes to
the existing firmware.

In the long run, softmac¹ definitely isn't the way to go for XO -- even
if you switch it to being completely autonomous while the XO is off, you
just don't want to be processing all the infrastructure stuff on the
Geode. For _debugging_ generic mesh stuff, however, I suspect that's
precisely how we want it.

When it comes to time to thinking about Gen2... CSR have fullmac devices
and a whole lot of Linux clue. Definitely worth investigating.

-- 
dwmw2

¹ by 'softmac' I mean the generic term -- a software MAC. Not the 'softmac'
  stack which Johannes wrote for use with bcm43xx. We're abandoning that
  and moving to mac80211 (née the DeviceScape stack).