On Sep 8, 2004, at 2:19 PM, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
On Wednesday 08 September 2004 22:51, Vladimir Kondratiev wrote:
Greg,
you missed one important point. Besides data packets, that every
driver now
convert .11<->.3 using almost the same code, there is whole story of
management. Many modern cards are "softmac" and do all management on
host.
I see no point for every driver to implement its own scanning and
association. It is simply waste of resources.
This is exactly what I meant. We need generic 802.11 idioc^W management
handling. And maybe also tx rate control, ACK/retries for
"completely-softmac"
cards like Atheros.
The net80211 code has generic 802.11 management handling based on
wireless extensions. Drivers that sit beneath it and have the
necessary capabilities automatically are usable, for example, with
wpa_supplicant (and soon hostapd). At the moment there is one driver
for Linux--the ath driver for Atheros h/w.
Rate control is another can-o-worms. The model we've taken is that it
is driver-specific.
I'd be very surprised to see "softmac" h/w come along that requires the
host to generate ACK frames explicitly; the timing is very tight and it
would suck a lot of cycles from the host.
Full spectrum of possible fullmac......softmac designs are not trivial
to handle...
Experience with net80211 indicates you're fine if you have a good
802.11 protocol implementation to fall back on. Then devices that have
functionality in h/w just supplant the s/w support. The net80211 code
defines a set of device capabilities that indicate, for example, when a
device supports various h/w crypto algorithms. Class-like method
override mechanisms are used to handle other issues.
This stuff is constantly evolving as more devices are hooked up but in
general it's worked out pretty well. I've tried to avoid a spaghetti
web of function pointers using callbacks only where it seems most
drivers will make use of them. For other cases it often is easier to
grab control early on so it's easier to optimize+share code. A
concrete example of this is the processing of 802.11 management frames
where the original code (that David saw) had an array of function
pointers to little routines that handled each frame type--it turned out
drivers didn't override these pointers so I removed them and drivers
that want to override the default processing override the "recv
management" method to intercept specific frames.
To make step forward, I suggest the following:
1. Dave's code is at least year old. someone need to start maintain
it,
starting with update for current kernel infrastructure. Get it
compile and
load for 2.6.9, for example.
/me runs away and hides
2. To debug stack, you don't need real driver. I can write dummy .11
driver
that will silently discard all Tx, and will provide some way for user
level
tool to simulate Rx (ioctl, netlink, does not really matter). For
logic, it
is sufficient. Later, when it will come to timing, performance etc,
it will
be easy to strip some real driver.
To evaluate a design and implementation show support for a few devices
at each end of the spectrum. The Atheros h/w is probably a good
example of softmac h/w. ADMTek 8211 is also in this category. I'd
consider Prism devices toward the other end. You also need to be sure
you handle single- and dual-band operation as each have different
requirements. Also 11g support takes work to get right so be sure you
have a softmac 11g card in the pile. Past that you get into the
security protocols, WME/WMM, etc.
Sound like a lot of work? It is.
Sam
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