Wireless Tools for Linux

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Documentation

To the very curious user

In case you want to read up on what things are being advanced within Linux wireless. This should help users become familiar with our latest developments.

Wireless-Extensions - what are they?

mac80211 - New wireless driver API for SoftMAC devices

cfg80211 - new driver configuration API

nl80211 - new userspace <–> kernelspace wireless driver communication transport

The Linux Wireless Extension and the Wireless Tools are an Open Source project sponsored by Hewlett Packard (through my contribution) since 1996, and build with the contribution of many Linux users all over the world.

The Wireless Extension (WE) is a generic API allowing a driver to expose to the user space configuration and statistics specific to common Wireless LANs. The beauty of it is that a single set of tool can support all the variations of Wireless LANs, regardless of their type (as long as the driver support Wireless Extension). Another advantage is these parameters may be changed on the fly without restarting the driver (or Linux).

The Wireless Tools (WT) is a set of tools allowing to manipulate the Wireless Extensions. They use a textual interface and are rather crude, but aim to support the full Wireless Extension. There are many other tools you can use with Wireless Extensions, however Wireless Tools is the reference implementation