Prism2 [was: Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008]

[John W. Linville]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 12:07:37AM +0200, Indan Zupancic wrote:
> On Tue, April 8, 2008 15:59, John W. Linville wrote:
> > Also lurking out there is support for the USB-based Prism2 devices.
> > The linux-wlan project had support for these, but the kernel.org
> > kernels do not.  Hardware can be a bit hard to find...
> 
> I know someone with such a card, and have used it myself for a while.
> I also looked into porting it to the hostap driver, but it seemed to be
> more work than I had time to spend on it.
> 
> Quoting the HFA3842B datasheet:
> 
> "The USB host port interface uses Microsoft's Remote NDIS
> protocol to communicate with the network software on the
> host computer."

The datasheets I found for that don't seem to have that quote...?

> The work involved seems to adapt hostap such that the communication
> is abstracted slightly more, making it easy to add USB support. Main
> work is figuring out how the USB communication differs from the PCI
> one, which boils down to learning how RNDIS works.
> 
> To sum up, I've no time to do it, but can probably help with testing,
> or give small hints here and there (e.g. card is very sensitive for
> which firmware is used, try the default, already loaded one first).

Well, the good news is that RNDIS wireless devices will be supported
in 2.6.26 via the new rndis_wlan driver. :-)  However, I don't think
that all Prism2 USB devices are RNDIS.

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at tuxdriver.com