On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 01:40:15AM -0500, Michael Hertrick wrote:
> David Young wrote:
> 
> >The Atheros cards support AP mode. Get one of those. I have two dual-band
> >D-Link DWL-AB520s that contain Atheros chips. They support .11a and .11b.
> >They seem to work pretty well as access points. I think there is an AG520,
> >also, supporting .11a/b/g. Beware of the .11b/g products, since some of
> >them are Broadcom.
> > 
> >
> 
> Would I be happy with any of those cards if I'm really just looking to 
> 1) get rid of the wires at home and 2) use a PCMCIA version in my 
> laptops whether I'm home or on the road in .11a/b/g world?
> 
> Wireless networking seems very volatile and I don't see that changing 
> any time soon.  In less than a decade we've already got three 802.11 
> flavors and vendors are constantly changing chipsets.  What will happen 
> to the BSD wireless support when many vendors decide to stop using the 
> Atheros chips and move on to something different and unsupported in BSD?
> 
> Linuxant (http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader) has an intriguing way to 
> solve the wireless card support issue... use an NDIS 
> compatibility-wrapper to utilize vendor supplied win32 drivers.  Of 
> course, I only think this is a good idea because it seems so difficult 
> to keep up with the ever-changing wireless industry that has little 
> intention of meshing with non-MS operating systems.  It could allow 
> people to use the latest and earliest cards before driver support exists 
> for BSD.  Could some of you present reasons a WiFi NDIS wrapper would or 
> would not be a good thing for NetBSD?

Certainly it is a good thing if you only strive to connect your x86
laptop to an AP using any old wireless card.

I think it is not sufficient because

* one of the goals of the NetBSD system is portability, and there
  are not Win32 NDIS drivers for MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, or Sparc (as
  Martin mentioned)

* it is doubtful that most NDIS drivers will expose all the capabilities
  of the chips, for example, the AP capabilities

* I think that the NDIS drivers will duplicate (badly) the 802.11 state
  machine, which means a buggy, bloated system

* the NDIS 802.11 API will probably not map to the BSD 802.11 API

* I doubt the quality of vendor-supplied Win32 drivers, after reading
  some crusty vendor-supplied driver sources

* NetBSDers cannot fix bugs in closed-source Win32 drivers, and we
  probably cannot get the vendor to fix all of them

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933