Summary Info on Current Status for 802.11 softmac Stack

Unmercilessly ripped from ​here.

About the SoftMAC

The ieee80211 softmac layer is intended to be a software MAC layer complementing ​ieee80211 layer in Linux with protocol management features that a lot of hardware no longer does but instead hands off to software. It is intended to handle scanning, assocation and similar tasks.

Source availability

The source code is available in the latest linux kernels, as well as wireless-2.6 and wireless-dev. Some additional patches are ​here.

The old code history is still available with Mercurial ​here

SoftMAC API

• ​Scanning
• ​Authentication
• ​Association
• ​IO
• ​Event System
• ​WX Handlers

Related Links

Currently, most developers are interested in the Broadcom driver and hang out in #bcm-specs on the IRC server sipsolutions.net:6667

Mailing List

​http://lists.sipsolutions.net/listinfo/softmac-dev

Projects using this layer

• ​Broadcom 43xx driver
• ​Ralink rt2x00 driver has started a softmac branch in their ​CVS tree
• ​Prism54 softmac linux driver was recently ported to softmac in the ​Arch repository
• ​zd1211 rewrite
• ​Marvell Libertas driver