integrating user-space drivers and Intel WiMAX network service

[Alexander Gordeev]

On Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:26:11 -0800
Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 2010-02-07 at 13:55 +0300, Alexander Gordeev wrote:
> > Hi All.
> > 
> > I'm the author of madwimax (http://code.google.com/p/madwimax/). I
> > was thinking about the future of my project :) and it seems that
> > the only way forward is to integrate it into the Linux-wimax stack
> > somehow:
> > 
> >  * by porting drivers to the kernel
> 
> I'd rather this stuff wasn't done in userspace actually; while
> userspace provides most of the capabilities, there may be some stuff
> that requires kernel space to fully integrate, including possibly
> hardware detection and full sysfs device tree support?  Like having
> the network interface hanging off the physical USB hardware device in
> sysfs.

I agree. There is no problem with hot plugging because udev deals with
this. And sysfs is not integration is not a big problem as well. But
there is no way to deal with suspend/resume currently. Probably wecan
subscribe to some acpid/d-bus notifications. But it's getting to
complicated.

There were two main reasons why I started the project as a user-space
driver:
 * I had no kernel programming experience
 * portability

The first reason is not an issue anymore, but the second is still
urgent.

> I've been trying to get a Samsung WiMAX device (ideally the
> ExpressCard) for a long time.  Can I PayPal you some money for one of
> the Yota ExpressCard ones?  I'd take a stab at making a kernel driver
> for it, or working off the existing attempt to port madwimax to the
> kernel.

OK, no problem. Let's arrange this privately.

-- 
  Alexander
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