Re: [Madwifi-users] [ath5k-devel] MadWifi reference edition

[Nick K. <mic...@gm...>]

2013/11/13 Pavel Roskin <pr...@gn...>:
> Hello!
>
> This might be of interest for developers working on ath5k and ath9k
> drivers.  It may be useful to have working MadWifi code for reference
> to see how MadWifi accesses hardware registers, what packets it would
> send, how it would communicate with other devices, how fast the
> connections would be.
>
> I fully realize that the MadWifi code is ugly and I don't want anyone
> to use it for any new serious project (I know that existing embedded
> systems still use MadWifi).  Still, it's very unhelpful for developers
> that the MadWifi site is down and the MadWifi code doesn't compile for
> the latest kernels.
>
> So I forked MadWifi on GitHub:
> https://github.com/proski/madwifi
>
> Here's the summary of the changes I've made so far:
>
> Compilation fixed for Linux 3.10-3.12 and the current linux-next.
> ath_info removed, it's should probably be maintained separately.
> Removed integration with the official Subversion repository (it's down).
> Removed support for Linux 2.6.12 and older, I have no time to compile
> test it, let alone test the actual functionality.
> Fixed compile errors in rare cases (e.g. SKB debugging and no VLAN).
> Fixed some warnings, more fixes coming.
>
> The purpose of the changes is not to make MadWifi work better.  The
> purpose is to make it compile cleanly and serve as a working reference
> for ath5k and ath9k development.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin

I've already cloned ath-info to another repository since I don't have
access to the madwifi's svn anymore and I wanted to add some
functionality:
https://github.com/mickflemm/ath-info

I've also cloned madwifi-old-openhal there for reference (since
-together with madwifi-trace, dadwifi etc- got deleted from the svn
and it's not easy for someone to find them on old revisions-):
https://github.com/mickflemm/madwifi-old-openhal

I think since you want to go that way, it would be nice to switch the
binary HAL with the one from FreeBSD or Atheros's LegacyHAL, it should
be easy to do so (API should still be the same) and it'll be much
easier to compare ath5k/ath9k to madwifi+freebsdHAL/AtherosHAL since
we'll also have source code access to the HAL. However IMHO it should
be much easier to compare FreeBSD to Linux than maintaining madwifi
for this purpose, not only we have the latest net80211 code there, the
HAL is also open source, maintained/updated, contains 11n support etc.

I know that a lot of people are using MadWiFi on embedded systems
-especially for ar5k chips- mostly due to turbo support (which we also
have on ath5k, we just don't have a way to set it from userspace). I'd
really like to see them contribute to ath5k to fit their needs than
keep on using madwifi, even if their changes don't go upstream it'll
still be much easier to maintain a patch that adds a feature on ath5k
than keep on using madwifi.

-- 
GPG ID: 0xEE878588
As you read this post global entropy rises. Have Fun ;-)
Nick