“Almost a year ago the Linux WLAN developers announced the switch to a new WLAN subsystem. Today the new system finally found its way into the mm kernel tree of Andrew Morton. In May and April 2006 it became clear that the devicescape WLAN stack will be the future base for the Linux WLAN drivers. The aim was to overcome the current situation of having several different subsystems for different drivers and to create a common, well documented subsystem. The new stack will feature a reworked driver for Broadcom bcm43xx drivers as well as a Ralink rt2x00 driver. And, as already mentioned, Intel’s ipw3945 driver will be implemented without the need for a proprietary deamon.”
i welcome this as someone who uses the rt2500 driver and can’t get 2×00 to work with fedora. i also don’t like the ipw3945d approach i’m forced to use on my other laptop.
i wonder if they’ll get networkmanager to finally work too….
I had the same result, only with Gentoo, on the rt2500 driver situation. Good to see some progress being made in that department.
I hope it wouldn’t be a wind up to say I’m using an rt2500 wireless card in Ubuntu and it just worked, even the GUI tools, same for Kubuntu.
This is, however, great news.
You’re using the rt2500 driver, not the new rt2x00 driver, right?
> Intel’s ipw3945 driver will be implemented without the need for a proprietary deamon.
Just ordered my new laptop from http://www.emperorlinux.com
It was great to specify an Intel 950 at order-time, instead of a less-open chip.
Just my way of sticking it to the opaque binary pusher.
I’ve been waiting for this, so that I can use both WPA and hidden SSIDs with my bcm43xx. It’s a pain to have MacOSX running under Mac-On-Linux with the sole purpose of connecting to the WiFi of my univeristy. Kudos to Devicescape Software.
Edited 2007-03-04 02:13
…that this will, as they suggest, give the whole ecosystem of WLAN driver efforts a strong common platform to work with, which will see those drivers progress faster.
At the end of the day, your success with WLAN hardware is still heavily contingent on the particular driver that’s available for it. As a Broadcom sufferer I was very excited when the reverse-engineered driver appeared, but after extensive tryouts it remained less useful to me than the Wintel driver + ndiswrapper (no ad-hoc support). When Devicescape is available in the Gentoo kernels I’ll definitely give it another whirl, but I remain fatalistic as to what results I’ll see in the short-to-mid term.
Someone knows if it’s possible to get a BCM43xx based card works with WPA2?
It’s all I need now to get Kubuntu on my laptop 😉
The newest NetworkManager will include native support for WPA2. The KDE equivalent, KNetworkManager, should include support for this in Feisty, the next version of Ubuntu due out in April.
Not that I know about Kubuntu, but I am happily surfing using WPA2 right now on my Ubuntu Feisty Laptop (HP zd1000) using bcm43xx.
It looks like this:
http://static.flickr.com/74/171380920_2ac40e9f40_o.png
http://static.flickr.com/74/171380918_79e25ad32b_o.png
Awesome! Finally, I will be able to use Kubuntu on my laptop!
Since you can’t have two network stacks at once, then we will have a lot a drivers for the old network stack that can’t be used with the new one, right? So what’s the point of this?
From the article:
It was made clear that there is still some work to do and that the driver is not ready for inclusion – yet. However, it was also made clear that it is not too far away, as realistic aims kernels 2.6.23 or 2.6.24 were mentioned.
The mm tree is kind of a testbed for new developments, that will probably find its way to the mainline kernel, so that driver developers can accommodate to them and more bugfixing/testing can be done.
Porting open source drivers over to the new environment until this stack hits the mainline should be a quite straight forward process (giving, that this development has been announced for quite some time and – again citing the article – most newer developments have focused already on the new stack) and wrt binary-loop drivers: Well, nobody ever guaranteed binary compability, right?
Why can’t you have two network stacks at once?? I’m not saying you’d want to, but I also don’t see the technical limitation and it is an intelligent thing to do in the interim before drivers get ported over to the new stack.
Since you can’t have two network stacks at once, then we will have a lot a drivers for the old network stack that can’t be used with the new one, right? So what’s the point of this?
Which old stack? There is more than one other one out there. I guess you’re talking about the in-tree stack, but I think most people now have wireless cards that don’t use a driver that uses the in-tree stack. There are a lot of different wireless implementations floating around right now and by the time devicescape is in the mainline kernel it will probably support everything that that the in-tree stack supports plus a lot of previously out-of-tree drivers.
Hi, I’m pretty dumb when it comes to kernel architecture and development, so excuse this question please: Does this mean that if I find an -mm patched kernel for my distro that it will have better native bcm43xx support? Or is this just theoretical at this point? Thanks!
I don’t know the answer to your question. But as the owner of a laptop with a Broadcom 4318, I’ve come to despair of support *ever* improving.
Oh, perhaps when the rest of the world is running 10gbit wireless, with early adopters trying out 100gbit, the 4318 might be well supported. But I’m not holding my breath.
If Broadcom headquarters were inundated by a freak localized tsunami tomorrow, I’d feel a little better. 😉
You should consider forking 20$ for Linuxant’s driverloader, an excellent wrapper for the Windows drivers which allows to use Broadcom-based WiFi adapters. I use it myself and it was well worth the twenty bucks. Features and performance are excellent, and the web-based installer is easy to use.
http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/index.php
it is not there (2.6.21-rc2-mm1). So I am not convinced than new WLAN was implemented really. Checking changelog for both kernel 2.6.21.-rc2 and 2.6.21-mm1 did not show anything new in terms of WLAN
I am surprised that ubuntu just now introduced support for wpa2.