[pkg-wpa-devel] Removal Of IPW Driver

[Will Daniels]

Hi,

Hope I'm mailing this to the right place, sorry if it's not :)

I was just looking at the Debian Changelog for the wpasupplicant package 
and noticed this entry for 0.6.1~git20071119-1:

* No longer build "ndiswrapper" or "ipw" backends. Etch shipped with a
kernel in which neither of these backends could work (> Linux 2.6.14) so
it is about time we no longer pretended to support for them.

Even though the Intel IPW drivers support WPA through WEXT now, there is 
at least one other driver that I know of, r8180 (Realtek) which was 
originally based on the IPW driver code (before WEXT-18 extensions) and 
so supports WPA using the IPW backend in wpa_supplicant, but not yet via 
WEXT.  So, the ipw backend really needs to stay there or at least be 
made available as a separate package or something.

The comment about neither the ipw nor ndiswrapper backends being able to 
work in kernels above 2.6.14 has me a little confused, since I'm 
currently using the ipw backend in Ubuntu Hardy with kernel 2.6.24 
(wpa_supplicant v0.5.8)...

Apologies if I'm just getting myself mixed up with something, only I 
would really like to work this issue out.

Thanks & regards,
Will