[Gllug] 802.11b/g cards

[Russell Howe]

Another ancient email (can you tell I'm going through a backlog? :)

On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 04:02:51PM +0000, Doug Winter wrote:
> I can however confirm that the madwifi drivers:
> 
>     http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/
> 
> work fine with the netgear Atheros based cards like the WG511T, and that 
> these perform very well indeed.  Although the drivers come straight from 
> CVS it builds and runs easily, even on my 64-bit system.

I'm sure I read somewhere that the Atheros cards don't have much in the
way of onboard processing (except hardware WEP, which doesn't help much
:) so for some devices it may place undue load on the host CPU.

I'm pretty sure that's why my Soekris net4801 only gets 700Kbit/s when
doing 802.11g, for example. This needs investigating closer, however.

The card in question is a Panasonic-branded miniPCI card, reported by
lspci as:

0000:00:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

vendor:device = 168c:1014

Purchased from a laptop repair guy in Hong Kong. Hooked up to an
antennae purchased from Solwise, as recommended by someone on this list.

> there's a closed source bit to the driver though, which is most annoying.

The OpenBSD folks have reverse-engineered this (and so has someone else,
according to a post on lkml) so it's now possible to run 802.11g using
free software.

I assume it's fairly easy to port the reverse-engineered code to other
platforms which use madwifi (I think they say that the same binary
chunk is used across all the OSes they support)

I would try it out on Linux, but I think I'm about to put OpenBSD on the
thing, after hearing good words at FOSDEM and Bruce's coverage of ucarp
and mention of pfsync on Saturday.

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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