Subject: Re: Prism54 WPA Support - wpa_supplicant - Linux general wpa support

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:06:35 -0400

Jouni Malinen wrote:
> The first thing I would like to see is an addition to  Linux wireless
> extensions for WPA/WPA2 so that we can get rid of the private ioctls in
> the drivers. Even though these can often be similar, it would be nice to
> just write one driver interface code in wpa_supplicant and have it
> working with all Linu drivers.. I hope to find some time to write a
> proposal for this.

One of the things that is nice about wireless-2.6 is that is affords the 
opportunity to totally rethink the wireless extensions.

Although a lot of people would howl, since HostAP is essentially new 
code from the mainline kernel perspective, a new userland API (and new 
or updated tools) could come along with it.

I have mentioned in the past (no offense Jean!) that I do not like the 
overly-generic wireless handler structure.  It is less type-safe than is 
generally preferred in Linux, IMO.

A low-level wireless driver should not implement ioctls, it should 
implement callbacks in some sort of 'struct wireless_operations' as is 
done in other kernel subsystems.

ioctl details should be hidden from low-level drivers as much as 
possible, through type-safe interfaces.  Strive to make both the 
wireless driver API and the wireless userland API easy to change and 
evolve over time.

	Jeff