The XO-1.5 software plan.

[Martin Langhoff]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 10:17 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other
> base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already,

One area we'll also need help with is the "under a tree" networking scenario.

If you've used an XO, you know what it works like: by default the OS
automatically forms an ad-hoc network between the machines present
using wifi but not relying on an AP. People refer to this as 'mesh'
colloquially but it doesn't actually require 802.11s (as long as all
the XOs are nearby).

In theory at least. In practice, the ad-hoc network facility is tied
to our use of a patched NM and our 'msh0' devices.

The current plans don't include using 802.11s, and there are hopes to
ship a more vanilla NM. This means that the 'under a tree' scenario
needs help in NM integration and a bit of elbow grease.

Ad-hoc networks can work pretty well for small numbers of nodes -- I
suspect that that Fedora users (specially laptop users) would benefit
from an easy way to run an ad-hoc network amongst machines, without
the need of a 'hostap'-able driver.

Cerebro has interesting code in this area -- a more ambitious goal
would be to integrate it into our stack, as it can mimic some of the
802.11s mesh behaviour. But even without magic routing and path
discovery, small ad hoc networks can and do work.

cheers,



m
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