On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 01:43:16PM +0200, Jiri Benc wrote: > On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:39:30 -0700, Jouni Malinen wrote: > > Which part do you think is hackish here? Sending the layer 2 update > > frame or moving it to kernel? > > The latter. > > Is it really needed to send it unconditionally for each added STA? And > cannot it be generated in userspace?
Yes, it must be sent out whenever a STA associates with the AP, i.e., for every STA and for every association.. This is needed to update both the internal bridge tables in the AP and the external bridge tables in switches etc. connected to the same physical net in order to make sure that future frames to the STA's MAC address are delivered to the correct AP--and within that AP, to the correct port. This was originally done in hostapd in userspace, but this showed a bug in which the local bridge tables did not get updated correctly in some specific configurations. In addition, doing this in hostapd would require that hostapd knows (or can learn) how the bridge configuration is done on the device and this information is not really needed for anything else, so there would not really be much point in keeping that functionality in hostapd. The simplest solution for this seems to be to allow the layer 2 update frame to be sent through the exact same path as any data frame from the STA would be coming. This makes sure that it goes through the local bridge in the same way as other frames from the STA would go and it will also be sent out to correct external (wired/WDS) ports automatically based on bridge configuration. -- 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
