Virtual WiFi on Linux?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 11:55:01AM -1000, Jim Thompson wrote:

> OK, if its not true then you and Simon should immediately GPL the  
> driver for Prism2/2.5/3.0 that implements
> the rest of the Devicescape solution for mBSSID that doesn't require  
> custom Prism2 firmware.

If we had such a driver, I'm sure it would have been released with the
IEEE 802.11 stack. Not being from this world part was referring to us
not having this kind of functionality for Prism2/2.5/3..

There is a _very_ old version of Prism2 driver for the IEEE 802.11 stack
and I don't think there would be any issues in releasing it, but then
again, it has never really been used in products and it has not been
updated for couple of years (i.e., it would be unlikely to work with the
current 802.11 stack version) and it does not have any extra
functionality over the current Host AP driver, so I don't see much point
in anyone using it.

> I understand why you can't do this for Atheros (because you use their  
> vxworks HAL, which will also never legally appear
> in public as source code), but I don't see whats stopping you from  
> enabling the (non-OFDM) Prism chipsets?

Difficult to release something that we don't have..

> Because from what I know, Neesus has provided custom Prism firmware  
> to several companies who have implemented "Virtual AP" functions that  
> use multiple BSSIDs on top of Prism chipsets.   At least two of these  
> companies are also Devicescape licensees.

That may be the case, but I haven't even seen that firmware nor a driver
that would be using it. I would be very much interested in getting a
freely available version of said firmware and driver, if someone were to
be in position to release them.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA