Re: [PATCH-v3 1/2] wireless: Support assoc-at-ms timer in sta-info

[Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>]

On 6/14/19 7:56 AM, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Fri, 2019-06-14 at 07:46 -0700, Ben Greear wrote:
>>
>> The point of my patch was to allow 'iw' to return a more precise time
>> that the station has been associated, so I am not sure that BOOTIME is
>> a good thing to use for that?
> 
> Depends what you want, really.
> 
>> +       if (sinfo[NL80211_STA_INFO_ASSOC_AT_MS])
>> +               printf("\n\tassociated at:\t%llu ms",
>> +                        (unsigned long long)nla_get_u64(sinfo[NL80211_STA_INFO_ASSOC_AT_MS]));
>>
>> -       printf("\n");
>> +       printf("\n\tcurrent time:\t%llu ms\n", now_ms);
> 
> Since you just print the time in milliseconds, and the current time in
> milliseconds, you don't even really have any value in the wall clock.
> Quite the opposite - this lends itself to subtracting to try to figure
> out how long it was associated, which is the completely wrong thing to
> do with wall clock - timezone adjustment could've happened inbetween,
> for example!
> 
> I really see no point in trying to give the wall clock at assoc time. If
> no timezone adjustment happened, you can just as well give the boottime
> and have the userspace figure out the wall clock. If timezone adjustment
> happened, then any calculations are wrong anyway, what would the point
> be?

So, maybe I return instead the elapsed time in the netlink API instead of a
timestamp.  I think that will give me the value that I am looking for,
and I can still print out the 'real' time in iw so any tools reading that
output and do some simple math and figure out the 'real' associated-at time.

If that sounds good to you, I'll code that up.

Thanks,
Ben

> 
> johannes
> 


-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com