On Saturday, Mar 2001 at 10:20:38 Greg Smith wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Mar 2001, Ivo Simicevic wrote:
>
> > I guess that using e.g. Compaq WL200 that has firmware that supports
> > software AP mode available for download from their site would not mean
> > breaking any law and wouldn't make Mark angry
>
> There are at least two pieces of firmware involved here. The update
> you're referring to from Compaq modifies the secondary firmware in the
> card, which houses some of the higher level card programming. That's a
> required update for most cards, but by no means is sufficient. In order to
> construct a software AP, the tertiary firmware must also be downloaded
> when the card is initialized. There's no way to legally acquire the
> tertiary other than to license it from Intersil, either directly or
> indirectly by purchasing the Absoval development kit.

I believe there is some confusion here. Generally "Software AP"
does not mean using the tertiary AP firmware, since the AP functions
essentially then happen in hardware. The PRISM2 chipset supports
a "Host AP" mode that theoretically passes up all the management,
control, and data frames to the driver, except some of the more
time sensitive frames, such as beacons. This is generally a
"Software AP". Supposedly, you can implement a Host AP on the PRISM2
with the Station tertiary firmware. Unfortunatly, this seems to be
yet another area where the docs are wrong, as I have been unable to
put the card into HostAP mode while using Station firmware.
Even using AP firmware, I have been unable to recieve any packets on
MAC ports 4 or 6 (one of those is correct, but the docs are inconsistent
on which one should really be used).

Rob
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