Linux: Wireless State of the Union

Jeff Garzik offered an interesting status summary on the current state of Wireless drivers in the Linux Kernel. He begins, "another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering knowledge or luck (or both)."

Jeff pointed out that there's still a need for an official wireless maintainer, "I'm just the defacto guy, with no interest in the job." He also noted the importance of finally picking a stack [story] and sticking with it, rather than continually coming up with new stacks. He continued on to suggest that this stack and all the wireless drivers should be maintained in the kernel tree, rather than externally as is common now, "the whole point of working in-tree, the whole point of this open source thing is that everybody works on the same code, and the entire Internet is your test bed. Quality improves the more people work together." He concluded that while things are rough now, there's still hope for the future.