Haiku Wi-Fi support

The bug tracker on the haiku-wifi project is closed now. Due to the integration of WiFi support into Haiku new bugs are now posted to dev.haiku-os.org.
More information about this topic here: http://www.haikuware.com/blog/wlan-stack-sum-up-on-going-and-future-work-html

Haiku's network stack is now correctly informed, when joining and leaving a WLAN.
This results in a more reliable behaviour under bad signal situations.
It should also fix previous IP assignment issues when using DHCP.

• prevent confusion between the old nightlies and the testing versions
• due to slow down in development there aren't anymore driver versions you could call a nightly :)

After restructuring the WLAN stack it is now possible to
- dynamically un/-reload the driver
- shutting WLAN completely down by using ifconfig /dev/net/atheros/0 down (reenabling might require a reboot, though)

Note: To reload the driver, it must be ensured that no program is using the driver. With issuing the command ifconfig /dev/net/atheros/0 down
you can enforce this.

This is the first version, where I was able to download the complete Haiku R1/alpha1 CD image with Bon Echo. So please when you already surfin' with the older drivers, go ahead and try the same. Feedback welcome, as always :-)

As there is currently no way for you to edit the Wiki page of working systems (http://dev.osdrawer.net/wiki/haiku-wifi/Working_system_configurations) please create a new Ticket with the Status Feedback and report your working system configuration.

• Loading of driver sticks closer to FreeBSD initialization procedures. Thereby driver loading works better for multiprocessing machines (e.g. Atom N270/280).

• Systems featuring CardBus or PCI-Express/Mini PCI-Express atheros cards are somewhat problematic. Enhanced debug output should shed some light on the reasons.

• Systems where wlan works but somehow instable, will profit from enhanced debug output, too. Especially to figure out why the connection was lost and why it wasn't reestablished.

For Testers: Please increase your syslog buffer size (see Preparing Haiku). Otherwise debugging output gets lost, resulting in useless bug reports. Especially netbooks seem to "suffer" this loss as they are filling the syslog buffer crying fast!

Nightly builds are snaphots of a days dev work. They may break more things, than the last official revision.
Thay main difference to an official revision build is, that I won't support nightlies in the bug tickets. So spare your work for the official revisions :-)

First of all: Only atheros based WLAN cards are supported at the moment. So most netbooks are covered by that. A comprehensive list of supported devices is maintained by the FreeBSD project: http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/stable/8/share/man/man4/ath_hal.4?view=markup

What to expect of the WLAN-Stack:

• auto connect to an unsecured (open) WLAN
• wlan device will appear as an ethernet card
• full support of Haiku's network configuration utilities (Network preflet, ifconfig)
• no WLAN specific configuration utility (neither GUI, nor CLI)
• no listing of available WLANs

For more information visit the haiku-wifi wiki.