Re: Microsoft MN-510 USB Wi-Fi ?

In message: <[email protected]>
            Bruce M Simpson <[email protected]> writes:
: On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 09:42:08PM -0700, Brooks Davis wrote:
: > On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 10:59:00PM -0400, Bob Johnson wrote:
: > It definatly won't work with 4.6.2.  There's no support for USB wireless
: > adaptors at this point.  I think there are linux drivers for at least
: > one type, but I don't know if anyone is working on a port of them.
: 
: If anyone's planning on reverse engineering these things, typically the
: drivers themselves are NDIS5 ones, not USB ones. The NDIS5 driver then
: acts as a client calling into USBD.
: 
: A number of people have taken apart these USB wireless adapters and found
: them to contain PCMCIA devices with a bridge chip of some kind.
: 
: If that's the case, and the bridge chip forwards commands in much the same
: way as the USB-ATA bridges in existence, then writing an additional layer
: for if_wi to talk via the bridge might be straightforward once the packet
: format is known.

Well, the usb based prism2 cards are definitely documented, and
definitely look a whole lot like the pcmcia version (minor
differences).  However, doing a usb attachment to the wi driver might
be difficult.  Bill Paul said we might be better off copying it to uwi
and hacking from there.  However, I'm not sure that I agree with him.
That might be faster, but it would be more of a pain to maintain.

Also, I'd suspect that the PCMCIA bridge kludge version would be a
little different than the native usb version.  It also wouldn't help
if you had a non-wifi card installed.

I'd also contemplated getting one of the adapters and writing a
generic usb<->pcmcia bridge driver, but soon realized I had too many
projects in the hopper and this one would likely drive me insane in
short order :-).

Warner

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