Stephen Stair has updated his homebrew app and released it as DS Wifi 0.3b.

Stephen says he didn't really tinker with its functionality, but it does have a lot of major bugfixes:

• Fixed major bug in arm7 (potentially causing arm9 to lose track of the buffer, and lock up I/O)
• Fixed bug that could cause _CANNOTCONNECT to come up incorrectly when associating
• Fixed blocking send() to actually be blocking
• Changed default behavior to use internal allocation system for memory (fixes interrupt allocation bug)

He decided not to re-release the examples package because they’re essentially the same. Some of you may be unhappy because favorite feature got left out (eg, probe requests, the WFC data alternate WEP key format, or native Nintendo USB key compatibility). Stephen says the project has become stagnant and has put it on standby until probably mid-November.

However, he will start with a complete rewrite of the 802.11 system and the TCP stack for DS Wifi Library 0.5 where these things will be addressed.

Download: [DS Wifi Library 0.3b]

We've reported on Stephen Stair, his Wiki, and his DS Wifi Library before. So we've decided to follow up on the guy and see what he's been up to. In the latest post at his blog, we noticed a few development notes for the Wifi Lib 0.3a. Here's what Stephen had to say about the bug he's discovered in 0.3a. The short version of what he's said? Basically if your wifi lib's been crashing on you, it's probably his fault. Stephen assures that the bug will be fixed when the next version 0.3b is released. He says he's doing his best to get 0.3b out as fast as he can:

"In the wifi lib, when receiving packets and under a few other circumstances, the Wifi lib in its present form performs a malloc call from within the Wifi_Timer() call, and can also perform a malloc call from within the Wifi_Sync function, for FIFO messages - the only problem is both of those calls are often within interrupts, so the possibility of pre-empting a malloc in 'normal' code (which, malloc is also called in printf, for reference) is nontrivial. The only problem with this, is that malloc wasn’t really designed for that, so a malloc call preempting another malloc call can cause fatal problems, corrupt the heap, or crash your code.

There are a few ways to deal with this problem, the first of which is to use a seperate heap allocator, which is the solution I'll be incorperating into 0.3b. Those of you in the know can also implement some form of locking, wrapping allocation calls in interrupt disabling code, or something similar. Another thing to make note of is this modification will cause the wifi lib to eat up a specific amount of memory on startup (which will be user selectable, probably set to 64k or 128k for a default) - there will also be the option to disable the new memory management if you have your own solution; which will be an extra flag that will be necessary to use in the init call!"

Remember Stephen Stair? You probably know him as SgStair, the guy who created a wiki to document a number of subjects he had worked on in the past and will work on in the future. Well, he's back to tell us that work is progressing on the DS Wifi library. Though it's not yet ready for a full release, Stephen has reorganized the library and added it as a module to the devkitpro sourceforge Concurrent Versions System (CVS) server.

CVS is a tool used by many software developers to manage changes within their source code tree. It stores not only the current version of a piece of source code, but a record of all changes (and who made those changes) that have occurred to that source code. Use of CVS is particularly common on projects with multiple developers, since CVS ensures changes made by one developer are not accidentally removed when another developer posts their changes to the source tree.

As some of you know, only a select few will be allowed to edit main pages but anyone is free to modify the discussion pages and provide feedback. For those who are sufficiently capable, this option will put you at the cutting edge of DS Wifi library development.

Stephen invites the chosen few: Feel free to download and compile the libraries, it’s an utterly painless process if you can get CVS to cooperate, the new build system dumps 4 output files (libdswifi7.a, libdswifi9.a, libdswifi7d.a, and libdswifi9.a - arm7 and arm9 release and debug versions respectively) into [root]/lib, and the include files you need are in [root]/include. The old lib used “libdswifi7r.a” and “libdswifi9r.a” for the release versions - the ‘r’ has been dropped for the new version.