1 Jan
2006
1 Jan
'06
4:39 p.m.
On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 22:29 +0100, Alberto Botti wrote:
Il giorno dom, 01/01/2006 alle 15.48 -0500, Lee Revell
ha scritto:
Yeah I was looking at the old driver. The old one looks like Windows
code, the new one looks like proper Linux kernel code.
Do you know what's keeping the new driver out of the kernel? Is it the
current confusion over the availability of multiple ieee80211 stacks?
Lee
Lee
That driver looks like a piece of junk. It's
clearly a quick and dirty
port of Windows code (the comments refer to running in "DPC context" and
IRQ priority levels which do not exist on Linux). And there seems to be
nothing stopping it from doing a LOT of work in (soft) IRQ context, like
decryption.
I don't understand why these developers would choose to develop their
driver outside the Linux kernel. It obviously will need a LOT of work
to be mergeable.
The current driver (divided into rt2400 and rt2500) was developed
externally by Ralink and later relicensed under the GPL, and it's
probably a direct port of their Windows driver.
The rt2x00 developers are currently rewriting the entire codebase (under
the name rt2x00 Open Source Project), bringing it closer to inclusion in
the mainstream kernel.
Don't forget that Ralink cards are some of the better supported wireless
interfaces available for Linux, having a completely GPL driver which
doesn't need external binary firmware.