There are many reasons to have the master device - and many reasons not to get rid of it. The only excpetion is when using a limited fullmac card. Some fullmac cards only support a single ethernet interface, so for these cards a single device may be OK, if we want to allow multiple different appearences for different types of card (a bad thing in my book). (Note - older prism 54g fullmac cards support WDS, hence need multiple interfaces).
The master interface represents the physical networking device that works using native 802.11 frames. The qdisc works on 802.11 frames - not ethernet, and it can change how 802.11 management frames are queued. It can only be got rid of in the case of a fullmac card with only a single interface, where all management frames are processed in the card. In addition as we move to make 802.11 devices native (i.e. create an 802.11 protocol) the 802.11 master interface will be essential. I don't see the problem with 802.11 master devices - they are not ethernet devices, and should not confuse any user space. Any user space that gets confused by netdevices with arp-hdr types that they do not recognise is broken, and needs to be fixed. Simon -----Original Message----- From: Johannes Berg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2006 6:23 AM To: Christoph Hellwig Cc: James Ketrenos; John W. Linville; Simon Barber; Jeff Garzik; Patrick McHardy; David Kimdon; netdev@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [patch] d80211: use pfifo_qdisc_ops rather thand80211-specific qdisc On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 15:05 +0100, Jiri Benc wrote: > - Single device is not as easy as it sounds. It would require rather > invasive changes in the networking core or ugly hacks in d80211. I'm > afraid this is something not achievable in a near future with current > number of people working on d80211. But in general, it's doable and > desirable, yes. Actually, just as a note to all the others (talked to Jiri about it already), I think it's easier than thought since the code is so convoluted. The only purpose of the wmaster device appears to be to have an outgoing frame queue through the qdisc. Since we require the 802.11 qdisc to be installed at the root for all netdevices anyway, we could just as well hand the frame to it right away. I'll look into that later today. johannes - 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
