On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 02:18 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 09:05:27PM -0500, Michael Wu wrote: > > > Softmac isn't the only wireless code that likes to be configured after > > going > > up first. Configuring after the card goes up has generally been more > > reliable, though that should not be necessary and is a bug IMHO. > > Ok, that's nice to know. > > > In order to scan, we need to have the radio on and we need to be able to > > send > > and receive. What are you gonna turn off? > > The obvious route would be to power the card down, but come back up > every two minutes to perform a scan, or if userspace explicitly requests > one. Would this cause problems in some cases?
Seriously, having all these different capabilities when the card is "down" is just madness. Down == Down!!! Furthermore, every card is going to support some other subset of capabilities when it's "down". When you bring "up" prism54 fullmac card, you have to power up the hardware, reload the firmware, let the firmware boot, and then talk to it. Doing that every 2 minutes is just a waste of time, effort, and power. If you want to scan, just bring the darn card up to do it. It's so much simpler that way, and I just don't see what having all this "every 2 minutes do a scan" policy really buys us. That doesn't belong in the kernel. If something wants to scan, userspace can wake the card up and do the scan. It's userspace that's using the scan results to configure the card anyway, so userspace can do the scan. Simple == good. Down == down. Lets just agree on that and save ourselves a lot of pain. Dan - 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
