The XO-1.5 software plan.

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 16:05, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> 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.
>
> NetworkManager 0.7 supports Ad-hoc wifi networks quite well. I've used
> it on a number of occasions to share my 3G dongle between a number of
> users. In that regard I suspect all that's needed is to be able to
> have some form of gui for it.

My experience as well, just the other day formed an ad-hoc network and
used salut over it with a machine running OSX. NetworkManager itself
is already ready for this use case, we only need to add the UI bits.

Regards,

Tomeu

>> 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.
>
> Do you have a link for Cerebro?
>
> Peter
>
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