On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 08:33 -0800, Simon Barber wrote: > 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.
While these are good points, I don't believe having the master interface as a *netdev* is essential. In fact, it now has no functionality as a netdev, if you try routing packets over it they're simply dropped. Of course we need some notion of the wireless PHY and cfg80211 explicitly represents that by assigning a wiphy index, but there's no need for it to be a netdev. johannes
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