Hi Pierre On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 2:07 AM, Pierre Bourdon <delroth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 5:24 AM, Pierre Bourdon <delroth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hello linux-wireless, >> >> I'm a developer of libdrc, a project that allows Linux computers to >> control a Wii U GamePad. Because of how the device operates, our >> library needs to be able to read the TSF value of the access point >> device from userland. >> >> We currently have a hacky patch that works for our use cases, but it >> would be a lot more convenient if that feature could be upstreamed. >> What would be the best way to proceed? >> >> Our current patch: >> https://bitbucket.org/memahaxx/drc-mac80211/commits/4a9823cf2a6733bc15a05cffaebd8850d07451a7 > > To clarify: I have 0 experience developing "clean" stuff for the Linux > driver (only hacky patches). A few simple questions that I have in > order to make this patch more useful: Usual procedure is to send the patch via git-send-email and people will comment on it. Even if it's a hack, please send the patch. And you might wanna CC the maintainers of the affected trees. > * Is there some kind of "threshold" for features like this to be > accepted upstream? How likely is it that this feature will get merged > in the end? If there's a use-case, it is very likely get merged (unless another more appropriate API comes up). So just keep pushing on it, nobody minds if you resend the patch if it was unanswered for a week. > * Is there any framework for exporting data from mac80211 drivers to a > /sys or /proc file? There is code that exports data to debugfs, but > that is usually not mounted by default or enabled by distributions. > Our patch currently uses a /sys file, but I think nothing else in > mac80211 does anything like that so far. >From inside of mac80211 we don't control any sysfs attributes, yet. Furthermore, device_create_file() is usually racy with device_add(), so you really should create global attributes via the .attr field of devices (or classes/types). See net/wireless/sysfs.c. But you probably don't want to introduce a reverse dependency on mac80211 from net/wireless/, I am not sure what to do here.. others should know better. > * Should integer values be exported as human-readable ASCII base 10 > numbers in proc/sys files or is exporting the raw bytes as our patch > currently does acceptable? sysfs must be human-readable and 1-value-per-file. See Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt. So if there's no strong reason to change that, I'd say convert it to ASCII and you're fine. You can choose a suitable base yourself, but base-10 is a good default. Regarding your patch: - please adjust your coding-style to Documentation/CodingStyle - The drv_add_interface() hack looks really weird.. are you sure you don't wanna bail out instead? Thanks David -- 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
