Subject: Re: [cfg80211 / iwlwifi] setting wireless regulatory domain doesn't work.

From: Arend van Spriel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2013 12:37:47 +0100

On 12/16/2013 12:22 PM, Sander Eikelenboom wrote:
> 
> Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 7:38:50 PM, you wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Sander Eikelenboom
>> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 6:53:07 PM, you wrote:
>>>
>>>> The best way to address all this is by automatic region awareness and
>>>> doing the right thing on devices, this however requires good
>>>> architecture / calibration data  / etc and all that needs to be
>>>> verified by the system integrators, and finally they need to be
>>>> certified. If you want to hack your firmware and software go at it,
>>>> just be aware there are reasons for things.
>>>
>>> Well the general problem seems to be "we don't trust the user" so we FORCE him to the lowest
>>> common denominator (without a way to overrule that) so he is forced to operate *well* within the law.
> 
>> Its simply stupid to have the user be involved, period, the fact that
>> a user would be involved should only be for testing or helping
>> compliance for a busted device, development, research and obviously
>> hacking. Linux allows all these but by default a device with firmware
>> and a custom regdomain that will barf if you try to use a channel that
>> is not allowed is a restriction in firmware. Feel free to reverse
>> engineer that if you don't like it but it just won't be supported or
>> go upstream. Now, the common denominator is generally optimized for
>> best performance as well so you shouldn't have to do anything, and for
>> APs -- this is typically carefully crafted for a region, also highly
>> optimized.
> 
>>>>>> It doesn't seem like you are getting your original requests getting
>>>>>> processed, so I don't think CRDA is passing it. Can you verify running
>>>>>> from CRDA code:
>>>>>
>>>>> They don't get processed unless i remove the return from the code as i indicated.
>>>>> If i remove that return it processes the request.
>>>>>
>>>>>> ./regdbdump /usr/lib/crda/regulatory.bin
>>>>>
>>>>> Although it's in a different location on Debian, /lib/crda/regulatory.bin
>>>>> the dump seems fine.
>>>
>>>> OK thanks. Can you send a patch of what exact change you made, it was
>>>> unclear from the paste you made.
>>>
>>>> diff -u file.c.orig file.c
>>>
>>> Well i just did a pull from wireless-next, to try Avinash Patil's patch.
>>> net/wireless/reg.c had already changed much so i couldn't apply his patch without.
>>>
>>> With his patch it sets the regulatory domain, although as now expected i still can not use channels 12 and 13 yet,
>>> probably due to those firmware restrictions.
> 
>> Its unclear what results you got, and yeah if the device is restricted
>> then its just the fw telling the driver its channels and you can't use
>> them. That's it. You won't be able to override information then unless
>> you hack the firmware
> 
> Ping ?
> 
> Is there anymore information you need to *fix* the problem ?

Maybe you did not get the essence of the response from Luis: There is
*no* problem to be fixed.

Gr. AvS