NOTE: this page is for archival only, see the note at the end of the page.

Welcome to the official Linux Wireless wiki

This is the main place to get all kind of information about Wireless Networking (currently only IEEE 802.11) on the Linux operating system. This wiki features information for end-users, developers and vendors.

This site covers mostly the new mac80211-based drivers and the mac80211 stack itself along with the new userspace and in-kernel configuration interfaces nl80211 and cfg80211.. If you want to keep track of the latest, please refer to our RecentChanges page.

News

October 10, 2007

Linux 2.6.23 was released today. On the wireless front, a variety of fixes and improvements were contributed all over the place. The biggest news items are the inclusion of the rtl8187 driver, which supports USB devices based on the RTL8187 chipset, and zd1211rw enhancements to support devices based on the Atheros AR5007UG USB chipset.

September 27, 2007

The Software Freedom Law Center has published a new statement which as per MadWifi's press release:

  • "... this should once and for all clear up any doubts about licensing practices we have used and details of provenance of code since the project's start all the way down to our current ath5k driver code.".

Additionally, the press release states that

  • "The audit confirms that fixes and improvements to work derived from OpenBSD's ar5k - specifically what is in the wireless-legacy repository now - can safely be contributed back."

As per the advice from SFLC new guidelines have been posted about about sending patches for Linux-wireless. To help keep track of changes under permissive licenses a new ''Changes-licensed-under'' tag is being introduced. Additionally we would like to request developers to subscribe to the guidelines page for submitting patches to receive diffs of changes to this guide so we're all on the same page.

July 31, 2007

The Software Freedom Law Center has published a statement clearing legal uncertainty of the reverse-engineered OpenHAL code used to drive Atheros PCI hardware. This is a significant step in the journey to support Atheros PCI wireless hardware in mainline Linux. Read the full statement here.

July 8, 2007

Linux 2.6.22, released today, features the initial inclusion of mac80211, the upcoming unified Linux wireless stack which will be shared between a number of drivers. No drivers in this kernel release use mac80211, but existing drivers will be ported and new drivers will be added later.

Alongside the usual rounds of driver updates and fixes, the Marvell Libertas 8388 USB-wireless driver was added, which drives the hardware in the OLPC laptop.

July 6, 2007

The Software Freedom Law Center has released a white paper detailing the implications of the FCC's new Software Defined Radio (SDR) classification on free/open source wireless drivers. This is certainly a step in the right direction, although the FCC's position regarding free/open code remains "more conservative than is necessary". Read the full white paper.

April 17, 2007

We're featured on enterprise networking planet: http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/nethub/article.php/3672491.

February 9, 2007

Intel launches a new site dedicated to their Linux wireless projects – intellinuxwireless.org. From their site, "Here you can learn about and download the latest development versions of the Linux-based wireless drivers for Intel adapters."


This is a static dump of the old wiki, taken after locking it in January 2015. The new wiki is at https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/.
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