As everyone probably knows, VoodooWireless is the major component which allows a hardware abstraction layer for a card to talk with OS X. This layer implements a nano-sized 802.11 (Wifi) stack and handles all Airport-related stuff. Few weeks ago I posted that this part was completed, and I’m trying to fix some bugs in it.
Today the bug with packet transmission was fixed (it was an incorrectly copied BSSID address in the wifi header - Apple’s association requests typically zero out the BSSID and the driver must scan for that on its own). Once that was fixed, the 2200 HAL was able to get an IP address and small packets were flowing.
But larger packets weren’t, and so web surfing or any non-trivial network activity wasn’t working. Further testing showed a very peculiar behaviour : Packets up to length 168 were being transmitted fine, but those from length 169 onwards were not. Turns out to be a problem in Apple networking stack (I think so), where the larger packets are not coalesced into one mbuf before being sent to VoodooWireless.
So those are the updates for now - currently trying to fix the problem with un-coalesced packets. After this, there is one little To-Do left with the scan results handling part.
UPDATE (40min later): OK, the large-packet coalesce bug is fixed. Had to manually coalesce the mbuf chain, but it works. I’m now online via the totally rewritten VoodooWireless + 2200BG HAL architecture! :-)
So now I’ll make the small scan-handling change and then 3945 is probably only a few days away.
