Mesh Potatos and OLPCs?

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 1:10 PM, Ed McNierney <ed at laptop.org> wrote:
> Luiz -
>
> I want to be clear that as far as I am aware OLPC has never "lost interest in supporting its mesh", and we have continued to look for ways to achieve its original goals.  In the XO-1.5 we opted for a WLAN radio that didn't have built-in mesh support because it used much less power (in all usage models), but we then went to considerable expense to pay for software development to ensure interoperability between XO-1 and XO-1.5 machines in ad-hoc collaboration situations.  We also spent a lot of money to hire cozybit to develop 802.11s mesh software for the XO-1.5 (running on the host processor) specifically for a potential project in Brazil.  Even though the Brazilian project required "mesh" support, Classmates were chosen instead so there was no opportunity for OLPC's hardware and software to be used further.
>
> Despite the ongoing expense, and the (to date) lack of progress on addressing the mesh scenarios OLPC has been interested in from the start, we're still very interested in any ideas and projects that might help OLPC's original mesh goals become possible.

Presumably the newer thin firmware (I seem to remember there's a
version of that for the XO-1 wifi NIC too) conforms with the mac80211
implementation of the 802.11s draft so it can (or at least in theory)
interoperate with other NICs in that have the mac80211 mesh support
[1] in the kernel mainline. No idea what the NICs are in the
classmates or if the Brazil deployment is even using Linux.

Peter

[1] http://open80211s.org/trac but it seems to be somewhat out of date
so I'm not sure what the definitive list of supported devices/drivers
is