2001-02-28 05:05:06

by David Gibson

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Alternative driver for Lucent 802.11 cards

I've written a driver for the Lucent and Cabletron 802.11 cards, to
replace the wvlan_cs driver. I'm looking for people to test this
driver with as many card/firmware variations as possible.

The new driver doesn't use the Lucent HCF-Light code, and as a
consequence the code should be easier to follow. The locking is also
slightly more sophisticated in that this driver shouldn't leave IRQs
disabled for long periods of time like wvlan_cs can.

The driver is basically complete, although it lacks a few features of
wvlan_cs (some less used iwconfig settings). Currently it supports the
Lucent and Cabletron cards, and it partially works (no WEP) on at
least one Prism based card (the Farallon Skyline). I hope to make it
support the Apple Airport cards as well, eventually.

wvlan_cs, the linux-wlan driver and the NetBSD if_wi driver were all
used quite heavily as references in writing this driver. This driver
is written (currently) strictly for use with 2.4 - it won't work with
2.2 or with the out-of-the-kernel pcmcia modules (mostly for trivial
reasons).

Currently it's not nicely packaged. The various files can be grabbed
from:
http://www.linuxcare.com.au/dgibson/dldwd/
How to build and install the driver is left as an exercise to the
reader.

--
David Gibson, Technical Support Engineer, Linuxcare, Inc.
+61 2 6262 8990
[email protected] http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Putting open source to work.