From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from mail4.sea5.speakeasy.net (mail4.sea5.speakeasy.net [69.17.117.6]) by ra.tuxdriver.com (8.13.7/8.13.7) with ESMTP id l0V2mDGQ003836 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=FAIL) for ; Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:48:40 -0500 Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:48:07 -0800 From: Jouni Malinen To: "John W. Linville" Subject: Re: [RFC] cfg80211 merge Message-ID: <20070131024807.GA7061@jm.kir.nu> References: <20070131013717.GA28076@tuxdriver.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20070131013717.GA28076@tuxdriver.com> Cc: wireless@lists.tuxdriver.org List-Id: Linux wireless networking development List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: wireless-bounces@tuxdriver.com Errors-To: wireless-bounces@tuxdriver.com On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 08:37:17PM -0500, John W. Linville wrote: > In London we agreed that it would be good to go ahead and merge > cfg80211. > Let me know if I've left anything out, screwed anything up, or if > you no longer think a cfg80211 merge is appropriate at this time. Merge to the mainline kernel? Do we really believe that this is ready for this now? I have to admit that I have not personally tested this, but based on what I've heard, this does not seem to be complete yet and there are some areas that may need to be changed or at least there has been some comments on desire to change something in the design, e.g., for the MLME requests and recently for the SSID handling. In addition, I have not heard of any user space programs that would actually be using this interface. What would happen if this gets merged in now and some major problems are found when people start implementing programs using this interface? Would we be stuck with maintaining this user space interface as-is for years without having a chance of easily fixing something? I'm all for getting this into the mainline kernel as soon as possible, but I do not think that this should happen before there are user space programs that demonstrate that cfg80211 can be used without problems and that the kernel side implementation is complete enough to allow some meaningful operations to be completed with cfg80211 (likely with WEXT disabled, i.e., cfg80211 being feature complete for, say, WPA authentication). I have been waiting for cfg80211 to become bit more stable and functional before implementing support for it as an alternative driver interface in wpa_supplicant. Based on what I heard in London, this would not work yet, but maybe now would be a suitable time to at least start experimenting with this by making a copy of the WEXT interface code and starting to change operations one by one from WEXT to cfg80211 based on what actually is available in the kernel. -- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA _______________________________________________ wireless mailing list wireless@lists.tuxdriver.org http://lists.tuxdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless