On Friday 29 September 2006 17:10, James Ketrenos wrote: > Johannes Berg wrote: > > * Should the userspace daemon be allowed to unilaterally update the > > regulatory information if it learns something new (via the user)? > > Many countries forbid users (root is still a user) being enabled to > override the parameters set up by the hardware vendor as tested for use > with a specific device. > > If the hardware and/or driver for the hardware advertises a set of > operating parameters, user space should honor those settings and the > kernel should enforce them. > This makes 802.11d impossible. There are already many ways of violating local regulations. We should not make it easy to override the regulatory domain parameters, but going out of our way to make it hard is not gonna work.
> With hardware that restricts operation to the capabilities it was tested > and calibrated for, this will likely result in a broken user experience > -- if they try and use a device on channel 13 and the device restricts > operation to channels 1 - 11, tuning operations will fail. > So the hardware should not even restrict tuning to channels 1-11, for example. That sort of enforcement belongs in the kernel, with information imported from userspace so parameters for various regulatory domains can be updated easily. (whereas with hardware enforcement, every change requires new firmware) Sure, it's a bit easier for an enthusiastic user to set the TX power too high or tune to channel 14, but it seems likely that the number of people who would do that is a bit smaller than the number of people who travel between different countries frequently (and would benefit from easy/automatic regulatory domain switching). -Michael Wu
pgpx43ngepnZZ.pgp
Description: PGP signature
