integrating user-space drivers and Intel WiMAX network service

[Inaky Perez-Gonzalez]

On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 15:29 +0300, Alexander Gordeev wrote:
> Hi Inaky,
> 
> On Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:47:31 -0800
> Inaky Perez-Gonzalez <inaky.perez-gonzalez at intel.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Hello Alexander
> > 
> > On Sun, 2010-02-07 at 03:55 -0700, Alexander Gordeev wrote:
> > 
> > > 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
> > > 
> > > It's good but it will effectively prevent people from using drivers
> > > on some wireless routers with an old 2.4 kernel which is very
> > > popular now.
> > 
> > Geee .. 2.4 :)
> 
> Kudos goes to Broadcom and their binary blobs :)
> 
> > >  * by allowing user-space drivers to be managed by Intel WiMAX
> > > network service
> > > 
> > > Is there any opportunity for this? AFAIK, it uses D-Bus, so adding
> > > some D-Bus interface for user-space drivers would be not very hard,
> > > right?
> > 
> > Well, this code is extremely Intel specific and the long term plan
> > would be to ditch it in favor of a generic service. However, that is
> > currently in the "until somebody has time to work on it", as no other
> > devices are coming forward with need for support.
> 
> OK, thanks for this info!
> Then the user-space port will only remain for wireless routers and
> we'll move to the kernel.
> 
> > That said, it'd be extremely difficult to modify it to work with your
> > driver. How high is the mad driver in the stack level? Does it connect
> > to NAPs or to NSPs?
> 
> Well, from what I've seen so far the dongle supports only connecting to
> NSPs. :( This device is still a black box. However, other devices are
> coming.

Can you give an outline of the HCI of the device? We need to design a
new kernel API for managing NSP-based devices then. The one I have in
the op_nap_scan branchs is for NAP-level devices.

Thanks!

-- 
-- Inaky