Yeah, that was all pretty much stuff I've read before. You mention 'fraught' which was I wanted it boiled down to- what product is available _today_ that can use this feature. Likewise, I do have an rt2500usb adapter, and didn't see any joy with it when trying 'iwconfig device mode master'. So any information on whether or not the output of that command would change based on the kernel would be helpful.

Or just shoot down my theory that that is a valid test. I believe I started doing that after reading the links you mentioned, and believing that if I saw success, then, and only then would it be worth spending time getting the tools and perhaps patching the kernel.

Also, maybe some essential info about why or whether support is in fact limited to chipsets. I.e. is it really physically impossible to 'fake' a real AP when you have the ability to read and write raw 802.11 packets? What actual hardware are these(?) chipsets giving us that makes something possible that wouldn't be without the hardware.

Basically my real issue is NDS homebrew, whose toolchain currently only supports AP mode, and not ad-hoc. There are libraries(liblobby) which sound like they crudely achieve the quasi-ad-hoc mode that nintendo uses for its games, but I don't want to invest the time with those, or writing my own crude-hack, until I have a better understanding of what truly are the hardware issues involved, especially because my interest is in the nds as a universal cloud device that could control any PC in any arbitrary way. Right now I just dedicate an AP to the task, but I would love it if I didn't have to (and from my vague knowledge, I'm sure what I want is possible, and was hoping this was a good quick first pass)

Someone- please tell me what usb wifi adapter product can be used to make this happen? I have searched and found some related docs that mention support being limited to a couple chipsets. Which always confused my too-much-but-too-little networking knowledge. The git commit message here mentions nothing about hardware support limits. My prior test, perhaps invalid, was to take a fedora-9 box, buy several usb adapters, and type "iwconfig bla mode master" hoping for success, but never seeing success. I always thought this was because the prism2 or whatever supported chipsets were rare, but now maybe I'm thinking the code wasn't in the kernel yet??? Please someone, give me a link to a newegg or amazon usb product, and the essence of the quick howto.

"
A humble proposal: We need another layer, between the block layer and the filesystem layer -- call it an extent layer
"

Hmm... I guess it's below the block layer, but... devicemapper/lvm?

"
But this would be enough information to effectively handle mirroring, striping, snapshotting, copy-on-write, etc.
"

Yeah, dm does all that... (but I'm guessing not quite as much as you were looking for)