[Prism54-users] Re: [Prism54-devel] Prism54 development update

[Maximilian Engelhardt]

On Mi, 2005-08-31 at 16:32 +0300, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> 
> This could (should) be achieved with...
> 
> > - being more resistant to possible future protocol and hardware changes - if 
> > Prism54 didn't rely on FullMAC that much, support for the 3886 and 3887 would 
> > have been much more easy (probably as simple as cutting down the firmware 
> > code and offloading operations to the host).
>            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> exactly this!
> 
> Actually, what is the minimum needed from a wireless card?
> 
> * ability to tx an arbitrary packet at given rate/modulation
>   (automatic retry and/or rate fallback is nice but not 100% reqd)
> * ability to autonomously tx very low level control stuff
>   like sending ACKs (it's time critical)
> * tune into given channel
> * rx packets
> * DMA packets to/from host via PCI / transfer data over USB / whatever
> * anything else?
> 
> Beacons, association, even WEP and scanning - all can be done by host OS.
> This also will give us nice well debugged common 802.11 stack.
> 
> Thus bare minimum firmware can be rather dumb (and thus easier to write/debug).
> Maybe we (wireless crowd, not just Prism54 project) should aim
> exactly to such "bare minimum fw" approach?

I disagree with this. I think the firmware should to as much as possible
to avoid CPU load. On the one hand this gives greater performance, on
the other hand it can perhaps save some power on laptops. And if we have
a fully open source firmware we will be able to implement everything we
want.
I don't think building and minimum firmware is wrong, I'm sure it will
be very good for debugging (as you mentioned above), but I think a
"bigger" firmware should be used by a final driver for my above
mentioned reasons.

Maxi
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