Porting hostapd and wpa_supplicant to a new driver

[Dan Searle]

Hi,

I am working on a new Xscale (IXP425) based wireless router, using SnapGear
Linux (uClinux/uClibc based) as the OS. The device will use the Phillips
dual-chip 802.11a/b/g chipset, which uses an SA5250 baseband processor and
an SA5251 radio-on-chip, packaged on a miniPCI form-factor.

I have full driver sources from Phillips, however, their driver only
supports 802.1x and static WEP. We have a requirement to support WPA/TKIP in
the product so having experience with hostapd in the past I took a look at
the current progress of the project.

I'm very impressed with the code for the hostapd and wpa_supplicant, and
given the excellent developer documentation, doesn't seem too hard to port
either the Phillips driver, or the hostapd/wpa_supplicant to work with each
other, i.e. make modifications to make them meet in the middle somewhere.

My question is, has anyone had much experience making drivers (other than
hostap) work with the hostapd and wpa_supplicant before? Are there any notes
anyone has about porting? Any pitfalls, caveats to watch out for? Oh, and
for the record, the Phillips driver doesn't use the traditional Linux
wireless extensions API, it has it's own set of user space utility programs
for changing settings on the radio interfaces, would this create problems
with porting the code?

Many thanks, Dan....

--

Dan Searle
Adelix Ltd
dan.searle at adelix.com web: www.adelix.com
tel: 0845 230 9590 / fax: 0845 230 9591 / support: 0845 230 9592
snail: The Old Post Office, Bristol Rd, Hambrook, Bristol BS16 1RY. UK.

Any views expressed in this email communication are those
of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states
them to be the views of a member of Adelix Ltd.  Adelix Ltd. does not
represent, warrant or guarantee that the integrity of this communication
has been maintained nor that the communication is free of errors or
interference.