Removing unmaintained and obsolete driver wrappers

Benjamin Henrion bh
Fri Nov 4 12:40:31 PDT 2011


On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Jouni Malinen <j at w1.fi> wrote:
> With 1.x version forked into a separate tree, it would be a good time to
> do some cleanup in hostap.git and finally get rid of some obsolete
> driver wrappers that are unlikely to be maintained anymore. If you think
> that some of these should remain, please let me know and provide some
> justification or better yet, volunteer to maintain them.. ;-).
>
> I'm not sure whether these even compile anymore and since there are
> plans on doing further cleanup in the driver wrapper API, getting rid of
> unneeded extra work with obsolete src/drivers/driver_*.? files would be
> beneficial.
>
> My current plan is to remove following from hostap.git (i.e., from 2.x
> releases; 1.x would still include these):
>
> driver_broadcom.c
> driver_iphone.m
> driver_osx.m
> driver_ralink.c
>
>
> I haven't yet made my mind on the following two.. Taken into account
> that Host AP driver is unlikely to get any real maintenance at this
> point, it could be time to get rid of the support burden in hostap.git.
> While Madwifi is quite a bit newer project, it cannot really be consider
> very active anymore. In addition, the only real use for these driver
> wrappers is with hostapd since the driver-specific station side
> interface has been obsoleted years ago by WEXT.
>
> driver_hostap.c
> driver_madwifi.c

My personal impression about the usalibity of ath5k compared to
madwifi is that the first one is really buggy and perform less well
then madwifi.

So as long as the quality of those drivers is not improved to have
equivalence of usability with madwifi, that might be worth to keep
them, even for legacy purposes.

--
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403
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