Antonio Quartulli says:

====================
batman-adv 20160229

this is our (hopefully) latest batch of patches intended for net-next.

With this patchset we finally introduce B.A.T.M.A.N. V: the latest
version of our routing protocol.
Technical documentation describing the protocol in more detail can
be found in our wiki[1][2][3][4].

For what concerns this pull request, you can find the high level
description right below.

[1] https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/BATMAN_V
[2] https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/OGMv2
[3] https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/ELP
[4] https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/BATMAN_V_Tests

 ...

With this patchset we finally introduce our new routing protocol:
B.A.T.M.A.N. V. Its implementation started quite some years ago,
but due to the big changes being introduced it took a while to be
discussed, designed, worked, re-worked, tested and debugged (well,
we're never done with the latest). The entire operation has
basically been a team work involving all the core contributors
together with other people interested in the project.

The new protocol is divided into two main subcomponents, called
respectively ELP and OGMv2. The former is in charge of
dealing with the neighbour discovery and link quality estimation,
while the latter implements the algorithm that spreads the
metrics around the network and computes optimal paths.

The biggest change introduced with B.A.T.M.A.N. V is the new
metric: the protocol won't rely on packet loss anymore, but it
will use the estimated throughput extracted directly from the
wifi driver (when available) by querying cfg80211.
Batman-adv will also send some unicast probing packets when
an interface is not used for payload traffic to make sure that
such values are current.

The new protocol can be compiled-in or not like other
features we have and when selected will pull in CFG80211 as
dependency for the reason described above.

Thanks to the big work brought up in the past by Marek Lindner,
batman-adv can easily deal several protocol implementations,
therefore compiling in this new version does not exclude the
older.
This means that the user is offered the option to choose
the protocol when creating the mesh interface (default is the
old one to keep backward compatibility).

Along with the protocol there are some sysfs knobs that are
introduced to fine tune some of its behaviours, but users
are recommended to keep the default values unless they know
what they are doing.

The last patch is about advertising our own patchwork platform
(thanks to Sven Eckelmann for having set that up!) in the
MAINTAINERS file.
====================
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>