MADWIFI / News: Recent posts

MadWifi release v0.9.3 is now available for download via sourceforge.net. Some of the highlights are a new HAL release, fixed support for some PCI express chipsets of the AR5006 family, fixed compilation against recent 2.6.x kernels and many bug fixes. More detailed information available at http://madwifi.org/wiki/Releases/0.9.3

v0.9.1 is now available for download via sourceforge.net. It fixes various bugs, introduces some new features and support for new platforms. Check http://madwifi.org/wiki/Releases/0.9.1 for the details.

It's been detailed on madwifi.org already, but it might be worth to note it here again: along with the switch to madwifi.org (see the previous news item from this project) we also changed from CVS to Subversion. The files that are held on sf.net's CVS repository for this project are therefore deprecated.

Please visit madwifi.org to learn more about getting the files for this driver, getting help for installation and configuration from our Wiki, and asking for personal help in one of our support resources.

The madwifi project moved most of its web services to another host. In addition, the long-awaited new source code from Atheros has been released.

Detailes are explained here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.user/8441

Have a look at http://madwifi.org and let us know what you think.

Be sure to check out our new Wiki, which is now also the new home of the Madwifi FAQ and other stuff related to documentation. Kudos go to Matt Foster for setting up and maintaining the Wiki.

Contributions to the ongoing work to create useful and easy to understand documentation are highly welcome.

Recently we opened two additional CVS branches: BSD and WDS.

BSD is used to import code from the FreeBSD atheros driver in order to extend the functionality of Madwifi with new features and make use of some stuff that's been made available by the latest HAL upgrade.

The WDS branch is used for introducing fully-fledged WDS support to Madwifi.

You're welcome to test any of these branches and report about your findings. If you're new to Madwifi and stuff like CVS, and/or not willing to cope with probably instable/broken code you should wait instead until the new features are integrated into the main ("stable") line of Madwifi.

A new HAL version has been released, which brings two notable changes:

1. New directory structure:
Up to now there were different HAL binary releases for FreeBSD and Linux. This situation has been fixed, so that all operating systems that use the HAL now make use of identical hal.o's. In order to reflect these changes the release files have been moved from hal/[linux,freebsd] to hal/public.
Important: if you plan to update your CVS checkout, make use of "-dP" to get the new directory structure. That is, update via "cvs update -dP".... read more

We now have a new mailing list, madwifi-docs. The goal of this list is to coordinate the creation of new and improvement of existing documentation related to madwifi. If you're interested (or just curious), feel free to subscribe at https://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/madwifi-docs . Every help is welcome.

Quite old news, but nevertheless: you can get daily generated CVS snapshots for madwifi from http://madwifi.otaku42.de . The site also has an archive with snapshots back to late September 2004.

I've just completed the back mege of the WPA branch into HEAD. The WPA branch should be considered dead and as soon as the public CVS is updated you should start pulling code from HEAD.

For those that have not been following the WPA branch note that the directory organization has changed. The old driver and wlan directories are replaced by ath and net80211, respectively. If you use

cvs up -dP

the old directories should be pruned so things will be less confusing. The version strings on the updated code should be 0.9.3.0 for the ath driver and 0.8.3.0 for the net80211 module. The module names have not changed.

Michael Renzmann arranged to have the mailing lists archived at gmane.org (thank you!). From his posting:

FAQ:

Q: What's the name of the archives?

A: The name of the groups are:
gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.cvs
gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.devel
gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.user

Q: Shouldn't that be ...madwifi.user*s*?

A: Yes, in a perfect world it would be like that. As I mentioned above, the subscription of madwifi-users has been done by another person some time ago, and either this person or one of the admins who actually created the group has misspelled it here.... read more

I removed the old release because it was too out of date and buggy. Please fetch code from cvs until we get a new release out.

Nick Petroni reports that the version of xsupplicant available in CVS now works with the madwifi driver. You will need the latest madwifi code from CVS.

From CVS:

o update copyright notices
o add 3com pci vendor id's
o lock operating mode at reset time; remove operating mode parameter
from ah_setPCUConfig and ah_beaconInit
o expose GPIO support for forthcoming IBM laptops support in the driver
o remove unused short preamble parameter from ah_setupXTxDesc
o overhaul regulatory domain support including:
- expose extended channel mode
- bug fix for world-wide roaming SKU's that limited channel usage
o change ah_setupXTxDesc methods for 5210 and 5211 to return AH_FALSE
so drivers can use it to deduce whether or not multi-rate retry
support is available
o 5212: up max retry limits from 4 to 10
o 5212: fix retry count calculation when using multi-rate retry
o 5212: mark final rate in xmit status as HAL_TXSTAT_ALTRATE when a
rate other than series 0 is used
o hookup Linux sysctl to hal parameters
o new MIPS-3 builds
o new XScale build

Richard Stevens is hosting a madwifi wiki at: http://madwifiwiki.thewebhost.de/wiki/

Matt Foster is providing a madwifi FAQ at http://www.mattfoster.clara.co.uk/madwifi-faq.htm