[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] WLAN GPL driver announcement

[From: Jean-Baptiste Note]

Dear list,

It has been brought to the prism54-softmac team attention that the wlan
chip used in the N770 was a conexant one. Further investigation with
Samuel Ortiz seems to indicate that the current "prism54-softmac" driver
could be compatible with the wifi chip of the N770.

I hacked up a tentative support for the N770 in prism54-softmac, based
on the GPL transport layer for the SPI bus present in the open-source
part of the N770 wlan driver.

I'm looking for N770 kernel hackers who would be interested in a 100%
GPL wlan driver, could help test and improve the driver (I don't own a
N770), and possibly do a bit of reverse-engeneering (needed as the
communication protocol with the wifi chip may slightly differ from what
I already know -- for instance, suspend sequences are unknown) on their
N770.

The code is available in an arch repository; instructions at:
http://jbnote.free.fr/prism54usb/

The current driver relies on a rather old version of madwifi/net80211 as
softmac stack. In particular, there is currently no support for
WPA. Work is under progress to make use of the now-in-kernel
ieee80211softmac stack. However several people report great success in
using the madwifi-based PCI and USB code in master, ad-hoc and managed
mode.

The current code compiles fine under scratchbox (but this is about the
only guarantee you have). Documentation is limited, so please ask if you
have any troubles compiling. As a basis, the README and debian/rules
files can be looked at for compile commands.

I've built very crude .debs which can be downloaded from:
http://jbnote.free.fr/prism54usb/data/code/debs/
They are built against kernel-source-2.6.12.3 in scratchbox.

These debs are basically of no use : this code has *never* been run. I
don't even know if the modules will successfully insmod (!), so patching
and rebuilding will be needed.

I don't know if this is of much interest to N770 owners, as the current
wlan driver actually does the job... But hey, who knows :)

Have fun !

Jean-Baptiste

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Note
+33 (0)6 83 03 42 38
jean-baptiste.note at m4x.org