September 9, 2009

With again almost 600 patches related to wireless, the new 2.6.31 kernel comes with many wireless changes:

• iwlwifi continues unification between 3945 and AGN hardware

• the often-discussed rfkill rewrite, along with rfkill integration into cfg80211

• rndis_wlan starts using cfg80211 as the first full-MAC driver

• iwlwifi support for 3x3 802.11n hardware

• cfg80211 now handles connecting to an ad-hoc network (including wext support)

• initial support for rt2800usb, but still experimental

• a new wl12xx driver for the TI 1251 B/G chip

• ath5k has enabled AP mode

• the hwsim driver can now separate its virtual radios into groups to allow testing mesh topologies

• there’s a new driver for new Intel integrated full-MAC hardware, also using cfg80211