Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 2, 2006 8:02 UTC (Tue) by freggy (guest, #37477)
Parent article: Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Yet another IEEE802 stack for Linux!? Wireless support is already a disaster in Linux, because several drivers use a different IEEE802 stack. Some info about current drivers:
- Intel Centrino: included in kernel, but make sure you don't have the latest one used in Core Duo's, because they require binary-only daemon
- Prism54 Fullmac: included in kernel, but driver development seems halted. No support for WPA
- Prism54 Softmac: there is some development, but seems it is too early to start using in production environment (no wep/wpa,limited documentation,...), not included in kernel
- Broadcom: in the past considered as evil for Linux, today there's a reverse-engineered driver which will be included in 2.6.17, and which has WPA support
- Ralink rt2x00: not included in kernel, because it uses its own IEEE802 stack.
- RTL8180: Realtek provided documentation, but driver delopment seems slow/halted.

So, situation in OpenBSD is a lot better than in Linux (OpenBSD has ralink driver included for example). And furthermore, from linux 2.6.17 on, Broadcom, infamous for being the worst supporter of Linux drivers, will be better supported than realtek, who has provided documentation to the community. Isn't it ironic?

It's really time that Linux developers start paying some extra attention to the current state of wireless drivers...

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 2, 2006 8:34 UTC (Tue) by vsu (guest, #37478) [Link]

> - Ralink rt2x00: not included in kernel, because it uses its own IEEE802 stack.

Only the original drivers provided by Ralink have built-in 802.11 code. The rewritten rt2x00 drivers were using the Intel stack initially, but now are using the Devicescape stack.

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 2, 2006 8:35 UTC (Tue) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] (4 responses)

>OpenBSD has ralink driver included for example)

Sorry to say but Oh goody for OpenBSD as if IF OpenBSD were that good then why are there not a lot more people using it i know of about 20 Linux users not 1 BSD user of any of the breeds of BSD..

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 2, 2006 10:53 UTC (Tue) by Viddy (guest, #33288) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, I'll bite :)

My router ( www.pfsense.org ) has a native driver for my rt2500 pci card. Works out of the box, and works much better than the serialmonkey drivers that I have to use for linux.

No faffing about reseting the card, set to on, set wep key, and routes and its good to go.

If the serialmonkey rt2500 driver was as good as the bsd one, I'd be using a linux base for my router, but its not, so I don't.

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 2, 2006 23:32 UTC (Tue) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]

where's the teeth then i aint felt none cant see none .. I stick by my statment

Pete .

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 2, 2006 11:33 UTC (Tue) by admorgan (subscriber, #26575) [Link]

Because OpenBSD is desgined to do one job and do it well, lock down security. I ONLY use OpenBSD for firewalls and critical network services. Linux is a great general purpose operating system. I have 4 of my 6 systems at home running it. My wife's computer is WinXP because she has brain damage, and my firewall is OpenBSD. OpenBSD does not have as broad support for hardware as linux, but if you need OpenBSD you probably need to design your system. Being a Network Engineer for a number of years (and a number of years ago) I have placed over 50 OpenBSD servers in the field. Every one of them is still running today, not one of them has had more than 5 hours of down time, and that was because power was cut to the server room. The requirments are stability and reliablity, not general purpose support.

In summary there is not one OS to rule them all.

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 3, 2006 12:15 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Your argument is fallacious. Here, let me change a few words to show the fallacy:

'If Linux were that good, why isn't everyone using it, not Windows?'

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 2, 2006 16:37 UTC (Tue) by mikew (guest, #27697) [Link] (1 responses)

It's really time that Linux developers start paying some extra attention to the current state of wireless drivers...

... which is what the recent 2006 wireless networking summit was for. Relax. This is all part of the plan. We're working on it.

Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source community

Posted May 3, 2006 0:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

ya.. It seems that the kernel developers were hit by the wifi clue stick some 3-4 months ago.

As far as devicescape goes.. it's pretty kick-ass.

If I can take my craptastic-100%-non-working-just-a-few-months-ago broadcom-based Apple Extreme and turn it into a suspend-to-ram, stable-as-bedrock, essid-finding, network-sniffing, high speed powerhouse by simply using the bmc43xx driver version based on the devicescape 802.11 stack then wifi on Linux has a very bright future indeed.

Realy, I feel very sorry for people using NDIS wrapper for these cards on x86 laptops right now. They are missing out on some good features.

The major downside to devicescape stuff though is that the current userland applications for managing wifi stuff (iwconfig for example) are not capable of handing the configuration of these cards properly.

Once I got my card working I've kinda of been paying attention to other stuff, so this may have improved since then, but actually compiling the drivers and setting up my /etc/network/interfaces file as well as having to patch wpa_supplicant to just to be able to use the card is the major PITA!

I got it working by following this guide..

http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Broadcom...

I got it working first using the guide, but now I am using a older version of the packages he has made aviable. Which helped a lot.

Keep in mind that broadcom support using the in-kernel 80211 stack (the intel one, I beleive) is in kernel 2.6.17 so people wanting the card to work may find it is easiest to grab a 2.6.17.rcX kernel for now.

Not sure which is the best route for now.