On Thu, 2020-07-30 at 07:52 -0700, Ben Greear wrote: > > Consider > > > > add interface wlan0 > > add interface wlan1 > > iterate active interfaces -> wlan0 wlan1 > > add interface wlan2 > > iterate active interfaces -> wlan0 wlan1 wlan2 > > > > If you apply this scenario to a restart, which ought to be functionally > > equivalent to the normal startup, just compressed in time, you're > > basically saying that today you get > > > > add interface wlan0 > > add interface wlan1 > > iterate active interfaces -> wlan0 wlan1 wlan2 << problem here > > add interface wlan2 > > iterate active interfaces -> wlan0 wlan1 wlan2 > > > > which yeah, totally seems wrong. > > > > But fixing that to be > > > > add interface wlan0 > > add interface wlan1 > > iterate active interfaces -> > > <nothing> > > add interface wlan2 > > iterate active interfaces -> <nothing> > > (or > > maybe -> wlan0 wlan1 wlan2 if the reconfig already completed) > > > > seems equally wrong? > > So, looks like there is a flags option passed to the iterate logic, and it is indeed called > directly from drivers. So, I could just add a new flag value, and | it in when calling from ath10k. > > I'm not sure it would really solve the second case, but at least in practice, > that one doesn't seem to be a problem with ath10k, and the first case *was* > a problem. > > If that sounds OK to you, I'll work on the patch as described. Right, that'd be the option 2. I described earlier. I can live with that even if I'd prefer to fix it as per 1. to "make sense". But I guess there could even be "more legitimate" cases to not want to iterate while restarting, even if I'm not really sure where that'd make sense? I guess Kalle should comment on whether he'd accept that into the driver. Kalle, as you can see above mac80211 appears to be broken wrt. iterating "active" interfaces during a restart - the iteration considers all interfaces active that were active before the restart, not just the ones that were already re-added to the driver. Ben says this causes trouble in ath10k. IMHO the right fix for this would be to fix the iteration to only reach the ones that have been re-added, like I've said above. OTOH, Ben isn't really convinced that that's right, and has experience with a patch that makes mac80211 return *no* interfaces whatsoever in the iteration when done while in restart. Like I say there, it seems wrong to me. But depending on what ath10k actually _does_ with this list, perhaps it's not an issue. Perhaps it's just transient state that it derives from it, so if it does it again after the reconfig is completed, it would in fact get all the information it needed. I'm pretty sure this would break iwlwifi, so one option (less preferred) would be to add a flag to say "skip iteration in reconfig". actually does the driver know it's in reconfig? Perhaps it could even do that completely on its own? Anyway, the question is what you think about doing such a thing in the driver, if it fixes issues even if it's probably not really correct. johannes
