Re: What does Network service do?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 14:08 +0800, cheney tang wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 12:08 AM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>
> wrote:
>         On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 21:09 +0800, cheney tang wrote:
>         > Hi All,
>         > I develop a wireless network driver now, it seems that
>         Network service
>         > is depanded on.
>         
>         
>         Do you mean the NetworkManager service specifically, or
>         something else?
> Yes, it is  NetworkManager.
>         
>         
>         > If no the service , the command ifconfig only says eth0 and
>         lo.
>         >  When the service is started, the DNS is changed wrongly.
>         > I try to test it on Unbutu, the driver work well without
>         Network
>         > service.
>         > I had read the FAQ, there is no what I wanted.
>         > Any suggestion is welcomed.
>         
>         
>         The driver should support the Linux Wireless Extensions API
>         (kind of
>         like NDIS on windows), and should work correctly with
>         wpa_supplicant's
>         'wext' driver.  Usually when a card doesn't work well with
>         NetworkManager, the driver is not correctly implementing the
>         Wireless
>         Extensions API, like not correctly handling concurrent
>         requests or the
>         non-ordered nature of WEXT. 
>         
>         
>         Also, if the hardware you are developing for is a softmac-type
>         part, I'd
>         encourage you to base it off the kernel's mac80211 stack,
>         which will
>         save you a lot of work especially with WEXT.
> Yes, it base on kernel's mac80211 stack.
> It is very strange that the difference is from Fedora to Unbuntu. On
> Unbuntu
> the driver can work well without NetworkManager, while on Fedora the
> lfconfig says 
> no wlan0.

What kernel versions are you using on each box?  The Fedora kernels
aggressively track upstream mac80211 git branches, while I'm not sure
what Ubuntu kernels do.  It may be that each distro uses different
versions of the stack, and since mac80211 is still under pretty heavy
development your driver may work with one but not the other.  However,
I'd expect linkage errors or panics, but you never know.

dan