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

From: Johannes Berg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:55:55 +0100

On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 15:23 +0100, Jiri Benc wrote:

> You are right. But it breaks compatibility with iwconfig unless we
> emulate 'iwconfig mode' command by deleting and adding interface. This
> means some events are generated, hotplug/udev gets involved etc.  In the
> worst case it can mean that we end up with interface with a different
> name.

Eh, right. In that case, I guess that dropping compatibility here would
be the only solution. Other iwconfig could still work though. I don't
know where to draw the line.

> I'm not sure about your concept of softmac modules. I wrote an e-mail
> some time ago explaining why I don't think it is useful and I haven't
> got any reply. Please, could you answer that e-mail first? (See
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-netdev&m=113404158202233&w=2)

I didn't really participate much in that thread. Maybe softmac was a bad
example for being a module -- it just seemed to fit the current model
that the in-kernel ieee80211 module follows.

> Could you also explain how would you implement separate module for AP
> mode? How would you bind that module to the rest of ieee80211,
> especially in the rx path?

Well, if you look at p80211 that davem wrote there are functions for
handling each type of the different receive frames. These could easily
be multiplexed into function pointers the module provides.

I really don't see why a plain STA mode card should be required to carry
around all the code required for AP operation -- handling associations
of clients, powersave management wrt. buffering, ... Sure, fragmentation
is needed for all, so it needs to be in the common code, and it might
make a lot of sense to unify WDS and STA modes, but AP mode requires
fundamentally different things and a lot of code that will never be
called in STA operation.
Putting it into the same modules and then probably into the same
structures just encourages bloat and interdependencies that I don't
think should be there.

johannes