Wireless Network Maintainer?
Quoted 3 lines · Nico Schottelius
Is there _anyone_ responsable for the wireless (802.11*) drivers in the Linux kernel?
Yes, the individual driver authors. Either check the names in
the source code or check my Howto.
Quoted 1 line
- easy interface = support for wireless tools
Can't agree me, but I'm biased. This is slowly improving.
Quoted 1 line
- compatibility with 2.5/2.6 modul interface
Wireless drivers included in kernel 2.6.X are already compatible.
Quoted 1 line
- support for AP-Master/AP/Ad-Hoc/Monitor Modus (like HostAP can do)
There is two aspect there.
First, I want the HostAP driver to be included in 2.6.X, and
I'm trying to make this happen.
Second, Master and Monitor mode can be implemented only in
drivers for which the necessary hardware documentation is available, which means only a subset of them.
Quoted 1 line
- device naming scheme should be wlanX -> easier to see what it is
There are pros and cons to that. Personally I prefer the
approach taken by the aironet driver (ethX + wifiX). The interface the driver present to the kernel is *really* an Ethernet interface.
If you really want easy identification, we could take the *BSD
approach where every driver use it's own unique device name.
Quoted 1 line
- support for external encryption (kernel modules/user space) like WLSec
Let's not reinvent the wheel again. What's wrong with IPsec ?
If you want to go that route, at least follow one of the upcomming standard (802.1x, WPA, ...).
Jean
Quoted 9 lines · Jean Tourrilhes
Quoted 2 lines · Nico Schottelius
- device naming scheme should be wlanX -> easier to see what it is
There are pros and cons to that. Personally I prefer the approach taken by the aironet driver (ethX + wifiX). The interface the driver present to the kernel is *really* an Ethernet interface. If you really want easy identification, we could take the *BSD approach where every driver use it's own unique device name.
Please don't do that. Leave it as it is.
If somebody is not happy with the ethX names, use the nameif utility to change them into more descriptive names. I've successfully done that on my firewall machine. It looks like this:
# ifconfig -a|grep "Link encap"|awk '{print $1}'
dmz
lo
loc
netThe nameif utility also is the right tool to link a device name to an ethernet hardware (MAC) address, so you'll never run into surprises again. Check out my cute little table:
# cat /etc/mactab loc 00:40:F4:47:EA:65 dmz 00:40:F4:47:EA:64 net 00:40:F4:47:EA:63
And hey, it's all done in userspace, the holy grail! :-)
Regards,
Toon.