On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 01:05:16PM +0100, Jiri Benc wrote: > On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 19:07:51 -0800, Jouni Malinen wrote: > > Actually, there is a use for the master device. It can be used to > > monitor what is going on over the radio from all virtual APs/STAs, e.g., > > by running Ethereal on it. > > You can add a new "soft" monitor interface and use it instead. There is > no need for separate master device.
Sure, you can do it that way, too. However, this is not the only use. I just remembered another one: QoS. Devicescape 802.11 code uses a qdisc on the master interface to take care of determining which hardware TX queue to use with WMM (which uses four different TX queues). Each virtual interface do not include own queue and outgoing frames are queued through the master device (again, this is something that matches with VLAN implementation). For WMM, the frames in different classes would need to be scheduled from all virtual interfaces together, not just separately. Would there be a better way of doing this without using a master netdev and qdisc/netsched? -- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA - 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