I’m publishing here an early preview of the API used to create wireless device HALs for VoodooWireless.
There have been many big changes from the initial API that I designed. The most important change is that the HALs will no longer be a provider nub for the VoodooAirportBridge client — that design got way too complicated, for both development and testing, from the client’s as well as the provider’s points of view.
The simplified design is a ‘superclass’ which derives from IO80211Controller. HALs will need to derive from this subclass and implement some hardware-specific functions. HALs will need to call some functions provided by the superclass when events happen (like card is turned off, scanning is completed, or data is received).
Most of the hard work will be handled by the VoodooWirelessDevice superclass, and HALs will typically only need to implement hardware-specific code. For example, driver writers will not need to worry about parsing probe responses to get scan results and network information — they simply pass the incoming packets up to the superclass which will take care of the rest.
Given below is source code of most header files that will be used during development of HALs. Hope this is useful to those who are planning to help write HALs for cards like 4965 or 5100.
IMPORTANT: All this source code is made available for preview/academic purpose only and the copyright remains with me (the author).
Note that it is not always possible to finalize the APIs before starting to use it. So, big and small changes are expected. To repeat myself: this is only a preview designed to give prospective developers an idea of how the final API might look like.
