Re: Don't panic (yet)

[Erich Schubert <erich@debian.org>]

Hi,

> Do you know if this will work for prism54 USB devices? (Unfortunately, I
> only have USB 1.1 and FireWire, not USB 2.0, but even 802.11b speeds
> would be enough.) Also, how would I be able to obtain a fullmac prism54
> without getting tricked into buying a softmac instead? There does seem
> to be a prism54 softmac driver as well[1], but it is clearly less mature
> and hasn't implemented WPA yet in any case.

Basically both should be able to do WPA. I've only used the isl3893
(integrated with ARM9 cpu, used in APs) version only, though. I have
extensive documentation for that, but under NDA. I've never used the
(beta) softmac variant for the isl3893...
AFAICT you can run both softmac and fullmac on the same hardware. In the
AP case this means how much of the handling is done outside the kernel
and how much is done inside by the driver. The softmac split apparently
allows easier addition of features, since they can't affect the (time-?)
critical part; the softmac firmware apparently (I havn't tested that
yet) can service multiple SSIDs.
Apart from that in my case the interfaces to the binary driver are
pretty much the same (you'll still need documentation for the exact
parameters, in case something has changed, e.g. how to set multiple
SSIDs...)
In the case of isl3893, WPA (AP-side) is handled by a (closed-source)
daemon.
>From the driver interface you can recieve the
authentication/authorization packets, calculate the key from these and
then set the wep-key for the kernel.
This is as easy as feeding the right datastructure to a kernel netlink
socket, which will just pass it on to the driver. In my case this
interface is proprietary though - the prism54 driver might have wrapped
it in ioctls.

best regards,
Erich Schubert
-- 
    erich@(vitavonni.de|debian.org)    --    GPG Key ID: 4B3A135C    (o_
  A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.   //\
   Wirklich gute Freunde machen sich erst aus dem Staub, wenn man    V_/_
           sie braucht. --- Charles Maurice de Tayllerand


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