With the various discussions going on about a generic 802.11 frame/management
stack, and the recent thread on wireless extensions, I wanted to find out what
people's thoughts are on where wireless management should occur -- kernel or
user space...
Within the hostap project there exists the ability to have some AP management
occur internal to the driver or (via the PRISM2_NO_KERNEL_IEEE80211_MGMT define)
in a user space daemon.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how much logic should be placed into the
generic 802.11 frame/management/control handling stack vs. pushing to a user
space component?
If (for example) AP associate request / response policy is pushed to a user
space component, by what mechanism does it make sense for the driver/application
to send/receive the 802.11 frames? Are people happy with the way Host AP
currently does it, or is there a better way?
Other types of policy that could occur in user space would be for scan requests,
probe response collection, AP selection to associate, etc. What is the general
direction the wireless networking stack should take? Minimize kernel side
wherever possible?
With ipw2100 (and I believe other cards) the hw/fw handles a lot of the above
internally, so the mechanism by which the user space application communicates
with the driver would need allow for hw/fw capabilities to be exposed so the
user doesn't get a broken experience.
Thoughts?
James
(of ipw2100.sf.net)
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