Time for a status update!
If you’ve been following the newsfeed, yesterday I managed to finish a majority of the driver for 3945. We’ve got scanning for networks, reception and transmission of packets working.
The biggest difficulty was to get the card to actually connect to an existing network. Unlike the 2200, for the 3945, it appears that the driver needs to send authentication and association requests via raw 802.11 management frames. Since transmission seems to be working, I played around with this idea and came up with an ad-hoc (no pun intended!) “plan” to get this working quickly. I finished implementing all the 6-7 steps, completing the goal I had in mind. Eventually this whole process is going to be moved out into VoodooWireless (similar to BSDs’ net80211), because the entire Intel wireless range from 3945 onwards seems to need this.
Now the not-so-good news: Steps up to 3rd (authentication response) are working well. The card shows up as ‘authenticated’ on my WiFi router’s information page. However, from here on, the actual association doesn’t work yet. Most of the work now is to debug steps 4 to 7 (specifically step 4 - sending the association request), so that a successful connection can be established. Everything else is in place already, so once this crucial step works, our work is mostly done.
I didn’t have enough time or energy to debug this further as I was going out of town that evening. I suspect that given the time, 2-3 days is the maximum this will take. But note that apparently iwidarwin is also stuck at this same stage. So we could well be in for a blocker. Again, I can’t say if this actually is the case as I’ve not had enough time to investigate this properly.
I don’t have easy access to the 3945 laptop anymore, but I suppose I can still procure it if needed since I’m in the same town for next 2 weeks. We’ll see how that goes; if it doesn’t work out, I still have the long list of interested beta testers, some of whom might receive test versions in the near future.
That said, next few are busy days for me so expect few, if any, updates. Have a good weekend, everyone.
