Subject: Re: wireless: recap of current issues (configuration)

From: Johannes Berg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 10:28:09 +0100

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 20:17 -0500, Stuffed Crust wrote:

> If you're talking about the former.. things get quite complicated, but 
> that could be handled by having two WiPHY devices registered.

The former; and yes, I thought about that too -- having a driver that
shows two physical WiPHY devices as a single logical WiPHY device and
distributes virtual devices among them...

> As for the latter, when you factor in the needs of 802.11d and its
> dependents (802.11j, 802.11k, and others) the stack is going to need to
> be aware of the available channel sets; both in the sense of hardware
> support and also the various regulatory requirements. 
> 
> The hardware knows what frequencies it supports.  Unfortunately this has 
> to be a somewhat dynamic thing, as this is often not queryable until the 
> device firmware is up and running.  
> 
> This can be accomplished by passing a static table to the 
> register_wiphy_device() call (or perhaps via a struct wiphy_dev 
> parameter) or through a more explicit, dynamic interface like:
> 
>   wiphy_register_supported_frequency(hw, 2412). 

Yeah, this is about what I thought of -- and it makes me wonder if the
stack really should be aware of the channelization, or if the WiPHY
driver might better just handle it itself.

johannes