On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 05:26:07PM +0200, Jiri Benc wrote: > The current implementation of ieee80211 as is in ieee80211 branch > contains ugly hack so it works with ethernet frames externally (which > are internally converted to and from 802.11 frames). Because 802.3 and > 802.11 have the same format of MAC address, it is somehow possible - > until you get to WDS and similar features. On the other hand, it allows > direct bridging between ethernet and 802.11 network.
WDS works fine with Ethernet connection. WDS links are point-to-point links with two addresses (RA, TA) coming from the link end-points and two addresses (DA, SA) from the Ethernet frame. > One of our patches fixes this so ieee80211 works with 802.11 frames. > This breaks bridging for now (uhm... it isn't change in userspace, is > it?). Later, the 802.11<->802.3 conversion interface will be added to > the bridging code where it logically belongs. Please do not break bridging between wlan and Ethernet interface. IEEE 802.11 development really needs to start looking at what is needed for AP (Master) mode and WDS links. Both of these are often used with bridging. I believe that the order here should be to first implement the conversion interface and only after that change to 802.11 frames. In many cases, I'm not even sure that move to 802.11 frames is that good of an idea. Let's at least make sure it does not break more than what is really needed. Things like variable header size (e.g., QoS vs. non-QoS for data frames) is likely to cause problems for many areas. Even if most of the kernel code would handle this (would it?), there are number of important user space programs that may be quite confused since they are used to sending and receiving Ethernet frames with fixed header size. Does this mean that user space programs will need to learn when to include QoS fields in the headers if they are required to send frames for which they need to set both the source and destination MAC addresses (e.g., RSN pre-authentication)? With 802.11<->802.3 conversion, these kind of problems are solved by removing the need to know about 802.11 details from user space. -- 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
