[Prism54-devel] USB advances

[Jean-Baptiste Note]

Hello,

I'm sending this mail to inform you of what's happening USB front, as
far as i'm concerned. If anybody else is working on this, then please
reply !

First, from all USB devices that i could gather logs of (available on
http://jbnote.free.fr/prism54usb ), i'm unhappy to announce that -all-
of them use the are softmac-based. This leads me to think that there is
no other way to manage USB prism54 devices, but i'd be happy to be
proven wrong...

Yet, I've managed to configure the device so that 
- you can tune its frequency
- it receives the broadcast packets and packets directed to it (read
beacons from the AP). You can see them for yourself by tuning the device
to the channel of your AP. Current code only accepts 
iwconfig ethX channel Y
The setting wont be reported in iwconfig listings, but the change and
received packets are printk'd, and will be available in you system logs.

The tarball can be found here
http://jbnote.free.fr/prism54usb/prism54-usb-channel.tar.bz2

The windows logs indicate that all other actions must be taken care of
in software (association management frames are clearly sent on the
wire).

I now face two problems, for which your advice would be much
appreciated:
- for now i've done things privately, building upon what is found in
CVS. While my code is horrible and disorganized, maybe i should put some
of the changes i made back into CVS. I guess that means some stability
about code organization is required, so i badly need someone to guide me
and tell me how to organize things... Should I submit patches here for
review ?
- i now need to interface to a 802.11 stack... I've looked at the
available code, and the simplest and clearest i've found is in the
ipw2100 (centrino) driver. There were talks, however, of an "official"
802.11 stack. Have you got any information on this ?

Greetings,
JB