USB support

Pavel Roskin proski at gnu.org
Tue Jul 1 12:35:21 EDT 2008


On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 19:25 +0300, Jar wrote:
> Pavel Roskin wrote:
> 
> > I would avoid using "3" in the
> > driver name.  prism_usb sounds reasonable to me.
> 
> How about hostap_usb if it will use hostap code.

I don't think it will.  hostap is pretty hairy and designed for a local
bus, not for packet interface.

Once approach would be to start with linux-wlan-ng and clean it up.
It's a lot of work, but you would have a working driver at every point.

Another approach would be to write a mac80211 driver according to the
Prism programming manual.  That's won't work right away, but it will be
fresh code not needing massive cleanup.  It will also reuse a lot of
mac80211 code, which is already working with USB devices, such as
rtl8187 and rt73.

Any attempts to reuse hostap code will require checking for locking
assumptions and lots of debugging without being able to bisect the
breakage.  That's going to be very labor intensive.  Also, some changes
to the hostap code will be needed, which would incur risks for the
currently supported devices.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin


More information about the HostAP mailing list