"John W. Linville" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Virtual devices will have a mode (e.g. station, AP, WDS, ad-hoc, rfmon, > raw?, other modes?) which defines its "on the air" behaviour. Should > this mode be fixed when the wlan device is created?
I think so. If needed one can delete and create. > Or something > that can be changed when the net_device is down? IMHO: unnecessary complicates things. > It may be necessary to remove, suspend, and/or disable wlan devices > in order to add, resume, and/or enable other types of wlan devices > on the same WiPHY device (especialy true for rfmon). A mechanism is > needed for drivers to be able to influence or disallow combinations > of wlan devices in accordance with capabilities of the hardware. If the control messages go through the main (WiPHY) driver it can decide and/or forward the request further, to the library. Not sure about netlink. OTOH I'm at all not sure netlink should be used for configuration. sysfs, ioctl seem a better options. Netlink is better for state monitoring etc. I don't know it very well though. > Do "global" config requests go to any associated wlan device? Are they any global config settings? sysctl or sysfs maybe? > Or must they be directed to the WiPHY device? Does it matter? If you mean "settings for a particular physical card" then WiPHY. > I think we should require "global" configuration to target the WiPHY > device, while "local" configuration remains with the wlan device. If "local" means "concerning the wlan device" then sure, yes. > (I'm not sure how important this point is?) Either way, the WiPHY > device will need some way to be able to reject configuration requests > that are incompatible among its associated wlan devices. Since the > wlan interface implementations should not be device specific, perhaps > the 802.11 stack can be smart enough to filter-out most conflicting > config requests before they get to the WiPHY device? I don't think so. The hardware driver should get the request first, the rest should look like a library. I've played with both approaches for years and I would avoid "802.11 using the hw driver" scenario if at all possible. -- Krzysztof Halasa - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
