As I'm sure you've read by now, Ithamar Adema, aka Cola Coder (guess why) has been working once again on Haiku's wireless stack. You can follow his progress over at OSDrawer, along with other projects, like the IMKit for example.

Last week, I wrote to Ithamar and asked about his work on the stack, to which he quickly replied. It's my own fault it took so long for this piece to show up here at ICO, and for that I apologize.

He begain his work while in Ireland. He was developing a webcam addon for usb-video devices, and wanted to implement EHCI ISO transfers. Unfortunately, he had to keep rebooting his Eee (to test the drivers) because he had no Internet access from Haiku. Where he was staying, he only had WiFi access.

He finally got tired of it and decided to get some work done on the wireless stack. He got some older work on it and went to work. And along with some happy timings from OSDrawer, he decided to host it there.

Here's some more of what he wrote about his method for the project:

"The approach I'm taking with this is that the source tree @ OSDrawer is a '3rd party plugin' for the Haiku tree, with an own 'compat' directory with the required changes to the freebsd compat layer, so we can play a little, without disturbing the Haiku lib too much.

Besides that, my first target is to have it as an extension of the fbsd compat layer, so the wireless driver binaries will probably be a bit bigger at first ;) This is just to get something running, and get some familiarity with the codebase. Once we've proven the 'port' works, we can start designing the proper 'Haiku' layer, and plug it in there."

His first target driver is of course the Atheros driver, since it's the one on his Eee. One of the advantages is that it's, according to him, one of the most complex drivers.

I for one am ANXIOUSLY waiting for this stack. I can't wait to surf the web, from Haiku, on wifi (and what about on a native browser? Cherry on top of the cake) and I'm sure many, if not all of you feel the same. Keep it up Ithamar and... get it done! :)