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First, WinModems. Now, WinWiFi.
zulux writes "Microsoft is actively encouraging WiFi (802.11b) hardware manufacturers to strip their devices of costly electronics, and use Microsoft software/drivers to make up the slack. And you thought WinModems were bad!"
Judging from what I've read elsewhere, the submitter may have interpreted the article a bit wrong. It's not so much that MS and Intel (also mentioned in the article) want to have the WinModem equivilent of 802.11, but that they want to make the access points cheaper by providing a software solution.
Apple has had a similar product, the "Software Base Station," available for Mac OS 9 for quite some time!
See this (much better) article for details.
As someone who spends a considerable amount of time these days hacking on WiFi card drivers, Host-based MAC is actualla a VERY good thing.
A good analogy of this is PPP. The current situation is similar to a modem manufacturer embedding PPP in the hardware, which is horribly complex and expensive to implement. It is much simpler and cheaper to let the OS provide the PPP services.
WinModems come in two flavors; host-based controller and host-based signal processing. The latter is pure evil; the hardware is nothing more than a A/D/A converter, and the host CPU has to perform all DSP functions to make it into a modem. The host-based-controllers have real hardware DSPs and whatnot, but they just tell the DSP what to do, essentially replacing an on-board processor+firmware with the driver on the host machine.
WinWiFi (which is really host-based-MAC) is neither. The WinWiFi card would become about as smart as the average ethernet card; ie it would be able to transmit and receive raw 802.11 frames, and then pass them off to the driver which then figures out what to do with them.
A good portion of the wireless cards out there already do this, and nearly all of the new ones will do this. Why? complexity and cost.
802.11 is rather complicated. The MAC must handle a complex state machine; with all sorts of little nuances. Handling transmits/receives, and their acks, association, channel hopping, and then the real doozey: encryption.
WEP sucks. Not just because it's fundamentally broken, but because it takes a bit of oomph to work with, and it's a little complex. And if this is done in hardware, you can't update it to handle newer standards.
Every single one of the 802.11 extensions to replace/augment WEP will require considerably more computation power in hardware; but in fact, most 802.11 (windows) drivers now do WEP on the host, because it has far more computational power to spare with zero additional hardware cost.
This WinWiFi initiative is nothing more than "hey, all of you guys have already written this host-based-MAC stuff (or are going to have to write it anyway) so why not just use the stuff already part of the OS? It's already been extensively tested and that way, you don't need to reinvent the wheel."
It's called shared code, and makes a lot of sense.
I've been banging my head against the wall a lot lately because of buggy firmware in WiFi cards; If they let the host OS do the work instead, these bugs wouldn't exist, because the 802.11 spec is well-documented.
And again, it's not WinWiFi, it's Host-based-MAC. It's a work-in-progress for Linux too. And it is a GoodThing(tm).
- Pizza
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
What is the chipset used in most WiFi cards? The Prism 2/2.5.
Who makes it?
Intersil
Are there linux drivers?
Yes! With full source!
And guess what, Intersil comissioned the drivers!
Not only that, but the drivers offer support for advanced functions typically not offered on Windows based PCs (host based access point support).
So, based on past history, there seems a good chance that there will be a path to Linux support for WinWi-Fi cards.