On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 10:21:37AM -0600, Eric Haszlakiewicz wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 10:33:19PM -0600, David Young wrote:
> > Certainly it is a good thing if you only strive to connect your x86
> > laptop to an AP using any old wireless card.
> > * one of the goals of the NetBSD system is portability, and there
> >   are not Win32 NDIS drivers for MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, or Sparc (as
> >   Martin mentioned)
> 	while it's certainly better to have a solution that works for more
> than just x86 machines it sucks to obstruct the possiblity of getting
> those x86 machines working with the hardware.

Eric, who the hell is obstructing the possibility of getting x86 machines
working? I say that it is a "good thing" for x86 machines. You are
dismantling a strawman.

> > * it is doubtful that most NDIS drivers will expose all the capabilities
> >   of the chips, for example, the AP capabilities
> 	Not having all the capabilities you want is not a good argument for
> preventing people from accessing the capabilities that are available.

Again, who is preventing?

> > * the NDIS 802.11 API will probably not map to the BSD 802.11 API
> 	well, duh.  So the NDIS shim needs to map from one API to another.  Just
> like the OS binary compat code needs to map from another OS's syscall API
> to ours.  

You are not even making sense. If it does not map, it does not map.

> > * NetBSDers cannot fix bugs in closed-source Win32 drivers, and we
> >   probably cannot get the vendor to fix all of them
> 	of course not, but we can't write all the drivers either.  We have
> a limited amount of development resources.  There exist drivers for
> hardware that people want to use.  We should certainly encourage native
> drivers, and clearly explain that we can't, in any way, support or fix
> problems with third party drivers.  However, it seems silly to completely
> ignore those drivers when they can provide functionality that we would
> otherwise not have at all.  The challenge it to strike a balance between
> efforts to fixup netbsd to allow NDIS drivers to work and writing native
> code.  The emphasis should be a on the latter, but not exclusively.

Thanks for volunteering.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933