On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 10:59 -0400, Jon Smirl wrote: > bcm43xx and rx2x00 let me set the channel before the interface is up. > zd1211 requires the interface to be up before setting the channel. > > Is there a guideline for how this is supposed to work? In the ideal case, the driver should allow you to set any _attribute_ when the device is down, but if you try to do an _action_ that requires that the interface be up (for example, associating), it should return an error of some kind. So setting things like encryption key, channel, ssid, bssid, etc should all work when the device is down, but actually issuing the 'iwconfig wlan0 ssid "foobar"' can be expected to fail because in WEXT that is supposed to trigger an association. Splitting up this stuff and having an explicit association request in nl80211/cfg80211 should make this a lot clearer. Most drivers don't do this consistently right now because they often assume that they can write the new values to card registers and such instead of putting them into a shadow state structure internally in the driver. Dan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
