On Thursday 01 February 2007 05:18, Johannes Berg wrote:
> I disagree. Generic netlink is trivially extensible while radiotap
> isn't, and I really don't want a radiotap parser in the kernel.
> Secondly, a lot of notification items will only be given via netlink
> anyway, like failed decryption or whatever, and we don't want to keep
> all this in fake management frames.
>
Okay then, let's not use fake frames then. Let's make monitor interfaces 
resemble monitoring ethernet a little more by reporting both RXed frames and 
TXed frames. *BSD does this too and it makes running ethereal on monitor 
interfaces much more useful. TX frame reporting can be done simply in the 
ieee80211_tx_status call, allowing the TX status to be reported on real 
frames. 

Doing this is actually somewhat orthogonal to packet injection via netlink or 
monitor interface, but if we are reporting TXed frames with a radiotap 
header, we might as well allow frame injection with a radiotap frame for 
consistency. It seems far better than receiving frames on one interface and 
then using netlink to TX on some wiphy. Not to mention that using a 
configuration interface to send data doesn't make much sense when there's a 
perfectly fine network interface available. Radiotap parsing isn't much 
harder than EID parsing, allows current frame injection programs to continue 
working, and might even make it easier to run those programs on BSD too. (I 
don't know what mechanism BSD uses for frame injection)

-Michael Wu