Linux gains enhanced WiFi stack

Oh now this is cool news! It will prove interesting to see exactly where this ends up with time. Thus far, things look pretty promising, though.

The day when WiFi cards “just work” under Linux may be fast approaching. WiFi software stack specialist Devicescape has released its “Advanced Datapath” 802.11 driver stack to the open source community under the GPL, and the Linux kernel developer community appears to be working to adapt it for mainline inclusion.

The Devicescape WiFi stack was previously only available to device vendors, under license.

WiFi card support is currently spotty in Linux, at best. Bright spots include Intel’s Pro/Wireless or “Centrino” radios, and lots of essentially obsolete, difficult-to-find cards such as those based on Prism chipsets. Meanwhile, cards widely available at major retail outlets typically do not work at all, or do not work fully under Linux.

Devicescape specializes in selling WiFi stacks to device vendors, and it says that Linux’s poor WiFi card support is limiting Linux uptake in wireless multimedia devices. It hopes its contribution will help developers quickly adopt the latest WiFi silicon technology into their wireless product designs, without having to wait for silicon vendors to release Linux drivers.

Additionally, Devicescape says its WiFi stack enables the Linux kernel to distinguish and properly handle different media streams, such as voice and video. It hopes these new capabilities will encourage open source developers to create new multimedia devices, such as voice-over-WiFi phones, streaming video clients, and devices that interact with Web-based services…. Source: LinuxDevices

[tags]linux,wifi stack,voice-over-wifi phones,streaming video clients[/tags]