Subject: driver for Lucent WaveLan/IEEE 802.11 committed
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org, port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
List: port-i386
Date: 07/15/1999 10:58:06
With some prompting by Christian Hopps, I ported Bill Paul's FreeBSD
`wi' driver for the Lucent WaveLan/IEEE 802.11 wireless networking
PCMCIA card to NetBSD-current.

It's been (very) minimally tested in the bar at the IETF hotel in
"ad-hoc" mode, and has not been tested against base stations.

There's also a "wiconfig" program in /usr/sbin which lets you tweak
the card settings; however, that did not appear to be necessary to get
two of the cards to talk to each other.

The card I did the port with was on very short-term loan from
Christian, so I won't really be able to do continued development on my
port of the driver..

I'd be interested in hearing about:
	- success using it to talk to "real" 802.11 base stations
	- successful use on non-x86 platforms.

There are a couple issues:
	- it uses SIOCGIFGENERIC/SIOCSIFGENERIC; Jason thinks it
should use SIOCSDRVSPEC instead, but there isn't a SIOCGDRVSPEC.
Given the multiple dozen configuration parameters, it would be easier
to just go with two ioctls rather than adding a get/set direction bit
to the DRVSPEC sub-opcode, but something can be arranged..

	- the transmit side does an extra data copy into a buffer in
the softc.  This really should be cleaned up since it makes the softc
about five times larger than it otherwise needs to be....

				- Bill