On Friday 26 August 2005 12:13, Jiri Benc wrote: > You mentioned problem with hooks in scanning/association/etc. Probably > everybody involved in this discussion knows it but I think it is worth > saying it: This is one of the most important things in a new ieee80211 > layer. Unfortunately, it seems that every driver developer concentrates > on the aspects of his device (this include ieee80211 layer from ipw as > well as from rtl8180). But every device (or more precisely firmware) > provides different set of features - some takes care of almost > everything, other can do basic things only. So the amount of work that > needs to be done in the ieee80211 layer is different for different > devices. The layer has to be generic. It has to cope e.g. with > authentication/association performed fully by itself as well as with > auth/assoc performed automatically by the device, etc. > > I'm convinced this is the first goal we have to reach before we start to > implement WPA, QoS and so. Right now, the adm8211 driver uses a number of specific hooks in its own ieee80211 station management code such as:
set_bssid set_ssid set_channel set_interval set_beacon Though with enough of these hooks, many devices can be supported, I think generic hooks like these would work best to support a wide range of hardware that use softmac: pre_scan set_channel pre_associate link_change start_ibss join_ibss Then for the devices that do more in the firmware, adding callbacks like: hw_scan hw_associate hw_start_ibss would indicate to the ieee80211 layer that the hardware is capable of handling those things itself. The driver should be able to find all the info needed to configure the hardware in ieee80211_device so only that needs to be passed to the hooks. A good portion of WPA can be implemented right now by implementing the encodeext ioctls and generalizing ieee80211_security to support more than just WEP. adm8211 doesn't have support for non-wep encryption yet, so WPA works without ieee80211_security support. Sound good? -Michael Wu - 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
