I went to the wireless-compat site not too long ago to see about mesh support on the Efika MX smartbook.

it seems it can be done with ralink cards but 2.6.31 just doesn't have it.

I would like to try it out with the next kernel version.

My goal for 802.11s is to see if I can get the Efika to talk to the tons of existing OLPC XO-1.0 laptops out there that are running the draft version of 802.11s on thier marvel chipset wireless adapters. I have two XO-1.0 laptops running a stock OS at home to test this against.

This also ties into my http://teotwawki.steubentech.com project that I'm slowly turning into a python/C based sugar activity (and regular Linux application, and hopefully sometime an android app) that can create a distributed BBS system over 802.11s, adhoc and regular wifi networks, a wired LAN, USB sticks passed around and hopefully soon bluetooth.

Getting Sugar to work as well as possible on the efika with the XO-1.0 when there is no access point in range is something I am interested in though beyond just making the Efika work with my personal project.

Thanks to steev I'm building a kernel now to test this with
I will post the results here. hopefully I can get the Efika talking on the OLPC mesh.

I did try the new kernel but I found out a few things about 802.11s support in Linux and the OLPC XO-1.

It seems every 802.11s implementation out there is based on various incompatible versions of draft standards. even different kernel revisions on linux may not be able to speak to each other. I did get two machines connected over the mesh but its not much of a useful exercise until this thing gets standardized.

Also unfortunately the 802.11s stuff in the libertas firmware of the XO-1 is not compatible with the mac80211 mesh support so thats a no go unless the XO-1s are running the libertas_tf driver and the exact same kernel version between all devices (including the Efika unfortunately)

FreeBSD also has a mesh implementation but it is again based on a different version of the draft standard and wont talk to the linux version.

I'm just going to drop this for now. Theres other alternatives out there for linux that do the same thing without the incompatibilities that I can use instead (but they wont do any good for talking to XO-1.0s out of the box. thankfully the more recent sugar OS for the XO-1 does support connecting to adhoc networks)