the very first official release of the Linux driver for Atheros WLAN
chipsets: MadWifi v0.9.0. Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen.
What’s new?
===========
The main goal of this release is to officially introduce “the new
codebase”, formally known by the working name “madwifi-ng”. It is a
replacement for “the old codebase”, now called “madwifi-old” (generally
called “madwifi” in the original documents). For those interested, the
relation between old and new codebase is explained at [1].
The new codebase has a lot of new and interesting features: the most
important being support for “VAPs” (Virtual APs). This feature allows the
creation of one or more virtual WLAN interfaces which can be set to work
in different modes. VAPs allow you to serve multiple SSIDs with just one
MadWifi-driven Access Point and one physical WLAN card, for example, or to
run an Access Point and a Client on the same card (repeater setup). This
adds a lot of flexibility not yet provided by any other Linux WLAN driver
to date.
Other features, including support for previously unsupported chipsets and
host architectures, support for turbo mode, compression, fast frames,
adaptive rate (SuperAG) and WDS operation are described on [2].
Should I switch now?
====================
Yes. With this release, madwifi-old is now officially deprecated. The old
codebase is no longer supported and won’t receive any updates.
Instead, we encourage all users to switch to the new codebase, released as
v0.9.0. It has matured during the past 8 months, and has proved to work
for most “normal” uses.
However, there are a few features missing that were available in the old
codebase (see [1]). Only a few users with special setups will be affected
by this, and we will work on porting the missing features to the new
codebase as soon as possible.
Are there any known issues?
===========================
Yes, there are known issues. The most important are:
* settings used in the old madwifi code still found in many distributions
are not always correct for madwifi-ng; you may need to read the docs and
man pages
* it is easy for many users to be confused whether you have madwifi-ng or
old madwifi (dmesg is your friend)
* stability problems when more than one VAP is in active use
* some annoyances related to changing operating modes and channel scanning
* suspend state not working properly
* some cards will fail to work when the countrycode is changed
A more complete list of outstanding issues and the wiki/trac references to
error reports and support tickets can be found at [3].
Despite these issues we encourage you to switch to the release v0.9.0
code. We are depending on the help of you, the users, to get detailed
reports about the problems you experience and how they can be reproduced –
this makes it a lot easier for us to track issues down and fix them.
Where can I get it?
===================
Download the source tarball from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=82936 or wait until
updated packages are available for your favorite Linux distribution.
Please be sure to read the documentation that comes with the release
(README, INSTALL and the users guide in the docs/ subdirectory). The
online documentation in our wiki [4] will be of help, too.
If you get stuck while upgrading, or run into troubles during
configuration, please use the regular support channels [5].
Last but not least:
We want your feedback!
======================
Please let us know if and how release v0.9.0 works for you, and what you
think we could do to improve it. We ask you to direct your feedback to the
madwifi-users mailing list, madwifi-users@lists.sourceforge.net.
Thanks for your attention. We hope you enjoy our very first release!
— The MadWifi team
Links:
[1] http://madwifi.org/wiki/NewCodebase
[2] http://madwifi.org/wiki/ngFeatures
[3] http://madwifi.org/wiki/Releases/0.9.0#Knownissues
[4] http://madwifi.org/wiki
[5] http://madwifi.org/wiki/Support“
