The next step towards the finishline (described by the WiFi-bounty on haikuware, Technical Information tab), will be the design of a native Haiku WiFi-stack.The picture below shows a coarse view of how the stack will fit into the networking system. WiFi stack - coarse design overview As you can see there are two distinguished areas, one is colored green the other blue. Green shows already existing infrastructure, blue shows the infrastructure I'm going to provide.
Screenshot of working WiFi prototype
Today I fiddled out the last hurdle on getting my WiFi-card up and running. It only connects to unprotected open wireless LANs, because there is no configuring mechanism implemented yet. Though it is far away from completeness.
On the screenshot, you see Firefox surfing www.haiku-os.org and downloading a 100 MiB file from my ftp server in parallel. The terminal is showing the result of the ifconfig command for my WiFi-card.
I managed to port the FreeBSD WiFi-stack, utilizing Haiku's FreeBSD compatibility layer. Thus I could use the WiFi-card driver for my atheros chipset from FreeBSD without any major changes to its codebase (I had to move some interrupt handler code into driver-specific glue code).
The driver-binary has a size of 500 KiB, due to compiling the WiFi-stack into a static library and statically linking it and the FreeBSD compat layer with the driver. Update: The sources are up in the haiku-wifi repository on www.osdrawer.net (read "For the bravery" down the line for more info on how to get it).
