WiFi stack - coarse design overview

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. The arrows should be read as “depends on, uses features of”.

So the blue ellipse encapsulates the blueprint of the WiFi-stack. The inner structure of the yellow box, saying “WiFi-Stack” will be my next task. The main reasons for designing a Haiku-specific WiFi-stack (in contrast to modify/port the FreeBSD one) are to utilize Haiku's strengths (multithreading, object orientation, ...) and to get smaller driver code (due to lack of all the FreeBSD compatibility code).

After accomplishing the yellow one, I'll pay my attention to the yellow-red gradiented box saying “FreeBSD-Adapter”. This adapter will allow to use FreeBSD's WiFi driver and use them in Haiku with just recompiling them. As you can see this is the same idea as realized for LAN driver's by Hugo Santos.