On Mon, 30 Jun 2008, John W. Linville wrote: > On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 08:36:56AM +0200, Johan Adolfsson wrote: > > Resending to linux-wireless after positive feedback on libertas-dev. > > > > Attached is a patch against the 2.6.25 driver that adds a > > module parameter called "regioncode" to set the region code > > in the libertas driver. > > > > Hope the format is ok. > > Signed-off-by: Johan.Adolfsson@xxxxxxxx > > Anyone want to offer an opinion on how this (overriding the region > code from the hardware) differs in effect from the patch that disabled > all regulatory controls on mac80211 devices? > > >From what I understand about regulatory practices, it seems > irresponsible to allow a regulatory setting embedded in a device's > ROM to be so easily overridden? IMO, it is actually the right thing to do. We should just plain ignore EEPROM regulatory domain information (not antenna gain and other data, just the "where in the world the card is" data) in the general case, except maybe if you want to use as a last resort default. Let me explain my reasoning through an example: I live in Brazil. It is extremely common to get crippled wireless devices here, because we get paired up with the USA and rest of the North, Central and South Americas by some very big vendors in one big regulatory domain. That's annoying, and I have been left without connectivity more than once when I was in a hotzone operating in channel 13 (which has *exactly* the same restrictions for usage as those for channels 1-12 in Brazil), but my card thought channel 13 was illegal to operate at. Now I get my trusty laptop with the EEPROM-based regdomain driver, and travel to somewhere where the channel overlap with the Americas regdomain the vendor used is such that the card can actually operate outside of the requirements for the local government. If I am lucky, it just won't allow me to talk to everyone like what happens in Brazil. If I am not, I could be breaking the law. Where, in the entire scenario above, was the regulatory information in the EEPROM useful to me? NEVER. It was a hindrance in every step. We live in a small world. Regulatory information in EEPROMs is something that just plain doesn't work well in the general case for any mobile hardware that you're going to travel with. Heck, in most cases it doesn't work that well even if you are NOT going to travel with, given the corners the vendors cut out of their regulatory domain tables... The whole idea of EEPROM-based selection of a regulatory domains is a failed concept. It cannot be fixed, so let's get rid of it. We can do better. I'd rather I could tell the system "I am in country foo", and it would apply all the regulatory information for country foo correctly. That's the way to go, since the system can't find out where it is automatically (but userspace could, actually, if given a sophisticated world map and (GPS or something else) geo-location feed). And, if we have devices that are exceptions (and I bet we do) and must be always locked to some specific regulatory domain, we deal with it on the drivers of these devices, instead of causing issues for everyone else. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- 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
