Socket Communications says its wireless SDIO cards are now supported under Linux, thanks to proprietary SDIO stacks from Codetelligence and EmbWise. Additionally, the cards support the CIFS NQ storage filesystem protocol through third-party middleware from Visuality Systems, it says.

(Click for larger view of Socket SDIO card)

Socket claims its E300 SDIO card to be the world's smallest, fastest, and most power-efficient SDIO WLAN card. The card is 1.57 inches long (40mm), and weighs 0.1 ounces (4 grams). It operates on 3.3V, drawing 187mA while transmitting, and 146mA while receiving. Listening uses 15.8mA, while sleeping requires 0.92mA, according to the company.

Additional features include:

• 802.11b, with dynamic rate scaling
• Claimed range of 300 feet in “standard office environment”
• Open, 40/64, and 128-bit WEP encryption
• Planned WPA2, CCXv1/v2 conformance (with driver support)
• US, European, and Australian certification

Socket says its SDIO WLAN cards are fully supported under Linux 2.6.x and 2.4.x by a Linux SDIO stack from Codetelligence. Additionally, the cards are supported under EmbWise's SDIOWorx stack framework, under variants of Linux, it says.

Additionally, Visuality Systems's CIFS NQ (network quick) client server middleware can provide Microsoft CIFS client/server capabilities under a variety of embedded OSes, Socket says, including embedded Linux.

Socket founder Mike Gifford stated, “We're delivering on our commitment to broaden our product offerings across more operating systems in the mobile device marketplace. Since operating system expertise takes years to develop, we're leveraging our peripheral hardware and software expertise by recruiting third party OS development partners to assist in our expansion efforts. We've already announced some design-wins with mobile device manufacturers, and we'll continue our efforts to deliver our WLAN products into more embedded systems.”

A proprietary Linux SDIO stack is also available from long-time embedded Windows software house Bsquare.

Codetelligence founder Paul Lever recently wrote this guest editorial addressing open source SDIO stack availability.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.