On Sat, 2007-06-16 at 11:29 -0700, Michael Wu wrote: > I think that decision was made without much consideration to the > implementation details. I don't think the implementation details are much of a problem. It's just a bit of message bouncing which is trivial. Except of course when you consider wext, but hey, no need to consider that for this discussion since you're proposing ditching wext completely. Not that I don't want to ditch it, but people still use it and probably will. Heck, people still use 'ifconfig'... > I thought it was a good idea then, but passing > messages from userspace to the kernel and then to userspace again is really a > waste of time. It's not happening a lot so it's not a waste of *much* time ;) > NetworkManager already uses wpa_supplicant to avoid all the > nasty details of dealing with wireless configuration, so why not keep using > it for everything instead of hiding wpa_supplicant behind nl80211? I hope that nm would start using nl80211 instead of talking to wpa_supplicant and just start wpa_supplicant if necessary. Or maybe some startup scripts start the userspace MLME (wpa_supplicant) for the interfaces during boot/hotplug. > This is > more simple and direct and allows the kernel to expose exactly what the > hardware/kernel can do. Userspace won't have to change much and nl80211 won't > have to support every possible thing a userspace MLME would want. It's not that the kernel will have to support everything that a userspace MLME would want, but rather that the kernel needs to support everything the MLME would want, to support fullmac drivers. Another counter: when you have a tool like 'iw' that David wrote, then it'll need to look for the userspace MLME every time you invoke it and start communicating with it instead of the kernel. That's likely a waste of much more time than just bouncing the messages. johannes
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