History

From Realtek Linux wireless driver

this is pasted from [1], a post by sourceforge user "falmouth":

What I've gathered about the history of drivers for Realtek chips is

a) Andrea Merello originally developed drivers. See sourceforge project http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtl8180-sa2400. He based these on a version of the ieee80211 stack that existed at that time.

b) Realtek then actively supported his driver development and he then stopped using the project in (a) and his updated drivers were released as official drivers on Realtek's site.

c) Realtek haven't updated the official drivers on their site for some time. They do not compile with the latest kernels.

d) The ieee80211 stack continues to be developed and is now included in the Linux kernel (from about 2.6.14) and is at http://ieee80211.sourceforge.net/

e) The drivers from the sourceforge project in (a) were picked up by Ubuntu. As Ubuntu have changed kernels they have updated the drivers so that they still compile. There doesn't appear to have been other changes. Their changes included renaming the modules and symbols of the ieee80211 stack included with the rtl drivers so that they don't clash with the kernel ieee80211 stack.

f) After Andrea Merello stopped using the sourceforge project in (a) other people continued to find the project and post in the projects forums changes to make it compile with later kernels etc.

g) Eventually hauke-m forked this project off the sourceforge project in (a) so that changes could be made to the code instead of just being posted as patches in the forums.

h) This project then realised that the Realtek drivers were improvements on the ones from the project in (a). The code from Realtek's driver was then adopted as the base for further development.

i) Since then this project has made changes so that its code compiles with the latest kernel as well as older ones. It has also updated its ieee80211 stack with changes to bring it closer to the ieee80211 stack now included in Linux.

j) In February 2007 a driver for the mac80211 stack was released by Michael Wu and it was put into the wireless-dev git tree. This driver version will hopefully get into the mainline kernel in version 2.6.22 or 2.6.23, now it is in Andrew Morton's mm patched kernel.

I have been running the drivers from here from soon after the code from Realtek's drivers was adopted. I don't have problems despite having had bittorrent upload over 1 GByte at speeds up to about 30kByte a sec (my ADSL is only 250kbits sec up).

If you look at the changes made by the adoption of Realtek's code they include some changes to spinlock handling.

Are the drivers used by Fedora and SUSE based on the original sourceforge project or on the Realtek drivers ?