some ideas about pseudo_adhoc (as rtl8187 cannot do beacon generation)

hi!
i've got an rtl8187l and want to use it in Ad-Hoc mode (actually pseudo_adhoc would actually even be enough!). i researched a little bit and found out that ad-hoc-, master- and mesh-mode are unsupported due to the lack of beacon generation support in the mac80211 version of the rtl8187 driver. as the softmac card probably doesn't support generating beacons in firmware, does that mean we need to setup a beacon generation fork repeatedly calling
ieee80211_beacon_get
and then sending the beacon? (very roughly, i'm guessing after reading any 802.11 code for 20 minutes)
probably a timing-critical task which needs to bypass the usual buffers and such i can imagine...

anyway. pseudo_adhoc (i.e. ad-hoc without beacons) is a nice thing and works great for use with user-space mesh-routing solutions such as OLSR, batman or babel. however, i guess as pseudo_adhoc is violating the standards (though it is very usefull) it might never be supported by anything else than proprietary drivers made by Atheros (afaik).

so. i want to use this hardware (RTL8187L) for this task (OLSR). any ideas? where should i start wasting my brain-time?

ot: anyone ever tried compiling the FullMAC r8187 driver (aircrack) for Atheros/MIPS systems?

cheers

daniel

TSF synchronisation is indeed critical since lots of mecanism like power-save, IBSS merges, ... requires a proper TSF. I don't know how accurate kernel timers are, but they might not match the IBSS expectation.

Pseudo-IBSS is just like IBSS except :
- you don't send beacons
- BSSID is fixed at 00:00:00:00:00:00 (so SSID is useless .... and since there's no beacon anyway).

Maybe you could image an IBSS-like mode where :
- you don't send beacons (or at least don't rely on them)
- you still reply to Probe Request by Probe Response (so you can still scan, search for an SSID and synchronize the BSSID). However, you can have splits without proper handling of IBSS merges...

I would implement this latter since it's closer to the standard 802.11 IBSS mode, which means less modifications in current and less interoperability problems.

Regards,
Benoit