Search Linux Wireless

Re: [PATCH] Revert "ipw2200: select CFG80211_WEXT"

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On 01/05/15 18:38, Paul Bolle wrote:
On Mon, 2015-01-05 at 11:14 +0100, Arend van Spriel wrote:
On 01/03/15 23:28, Paul Bolle wrote:
Side note: am I correct in thinking that there's some successor to
CFG80211_WEXT and that the ipw2200 driver could, at least in theory, be
ported to that successor? (ipw2200 hardware appears to be a bit old, so
probably no one would care enough to actually do that.)
net/wireless/kconfig doesn't mention anything like that, so probably I'm
just confused.

ipw2200 is a WEXT driver using some wext functionality (and struct
wiphy) provided by cfg80211 hence it needs CFG80211_WEXT. I guess that
is what makes it confusing.

It doesn't help that I hardly know anything about mac80211, cfg80211 and
nl80211 (and lib80211 for that matter). To me these are mostly just
names that end in 80211.

Grapjas ;-)

cfg80211 provides thin-layer API for fullmac drivers (running 802.11 stack on the device) and mac80211-based drivers (running 802.11 stack in kernel).

Anyhow, concerning, CFG80211_WEXT: it seems the only functionality
provided by that symbol that ipw2200 uses directly is
cfg80211_wext_giwname(). Perhaps ipw2200 could have a private version of
that function, something like ipw2100's ipw2100_wx_get_name(). Should be
trivial to implement (ie, it could take _me_ a day or two).

Indeed or even an hour or two.

But perhaps ipw2200 uses CFG80211_WEXT _indirectly_ too. Ie, in
net/wireless/core.c I stumbled on
     #ifdef CONFIG_CFG80211_WEXT
             rdev->wiphy.wext =&cfg80211_wext_handler;
     #endif

This is the "wext compatibility" being enabled for any cfg80211 or mac80211 based driver.


But I net/wireless/wext-core.c I then found
     #ifdef CONFIG_CFG80211_WEXT
             if (dev->ieee80211_ptr&&  dev->ieee80211_ptr->wiphy)
                     handlers = dev->ieee80211_ptr->wiphy->wext;
     #endif

wext-core is the WEXT framework and here it extracts WEXT handlers from a cfg80211/mac80211-based driver that are store in wiphy structure.

     #ifdef CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT
             if (dev->wireless_handlers)
                     handlers = dev->wireless_handlers;
     #endif

Here wext-core extracts WEXT handlers from a WEXT driver. struct net_device::wireless_handlers is only defined for CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT.

(There's much more to discover about WEXT, of course.) Anyhow, IPW2200
uses both CFG80211_WEXT and WIRELESS_EXT and cfg80211_wext_handler and
ipw2200's wireless_handlers appear to cover the same set of IOCTLS (one
exception: SIOCSIWPMKSA). So by now I'm really puzzled how this all fits
together.

I think ipw2200 is a bit of both worlds indeed adopting the use of struct wiphy and wiphy_register() call. That seems to suggest it is a cfg80211 driver, but it does not register any cfg80211 driver callbacks (see libipw_config_ops in libipw_module.c). So it overrides the WEXT ioctls because it needs that to interact with the device.

Regards,
Arend

Thanks,


Paul Bolle


--
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



[Index of Archives]     [Linux Host AP]     [ATH6KL]     [Linux Wireless Personal Area Network]     [Linux Bluetooth]     [Linux Netdev]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Linux Kernel]     [IDE]     [Git]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Yosemite Hiking]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux RAID]

  Powered by Linux