Re: [Wirelessdriver-support] Airport Extreme / 802.11g

[Rob M. <ro...@ma...>]

Nice assumptions, but...

1) Apple isn't using the Intersil PRISM GT chipset.  They are using a 
Broadcom chip.  This info comes from the hardware team involved.

2) There will need to be some work done to support the cardbus 
interface.  It is more than a little bit different than a 16-bit PCCard 
interface as it tries to handle things as if they were hot-swappable 
PCI devices, like PCI-X.

3) You could get the Airport Extreme card to work in a desktop with 
some work... namely a PCI adapter board.  There will likely be other 
issues you'd come across, but you wouldn't know in advance.

-Rob



On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 09:54 AM, Nick Sayer wrote:

> This perhaps isn't the absolutely correct place to ask, but I couldn't 
> really think of a better audience.
>
> I have a TiBook, so there's no hope of shoehorning the new Airport 
> Extreme mini PCI device in, but I had a thought and wanted to throw it 
> up for folks to kick around.
>
> I bought a Linksys WPC54G. When I stick it in the TiBook, I see it in 
> ioreg as a IOCardBusDevice.... But it looks a lot like a PCI device. 
> This is sensible, since so far as I am aware, Cardbus was designed to 
> look from a driver perspective more like PCI than PCCard.
>
> Well, Airport Extreme is a miniPCI device, which makes it look 
> *exactly* like PCI.
>
> I have already speculated that if you took a Linksys WMP11 and 
> replaced its 802.11b module with an Apple Airport Extreme module that 
> you'd be able to use Apple's own drivers to get desktop macs (with PCI 
> slots) able to use Airport Extreme.
>
> But I believe we can go further. If we start with a presumption that 
> everyone's using the Prism GT chipset for 802.11g, I suspect that 
> merely by editing the Airport Extreme driver's Info.plist file and 
> adding entries for the stuff that kicks back from ioreg about the 
> WPC54G that Apple's own driver will be able to deal with this card, at 
> least in some limited way.
>
> This immediately tosses up some question marks: Apple's own airport 
> tab in the network system prefs probably doesn't understand 
> hot-swappable hardware (meaning you may need to leave the card in from 
> power-up), and it may not understand having both an Apple Airport 
> module and an Airport Extreme card in the same machine at the same 
> time (meaning you may need to disable the Airport module somehow). All 
> of these questions remain unanswered mainly because no one has Apple's 
> Airport Extreme driver yet (perhaps coming soon in 10.2.4?).
>
> What Apple really ought to do is provide an SDK and/or some other 
> driver specification so that 3rd parties could hook into Apple's 
> Airport network control panel, but I suspect they would rather folks 
> buy new powerbooks instead. :-/
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>
>
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