On Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:13:13 +0100, "Johannes Berg" <johannes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said: > > Not really, in the short term, you still are using iwconfig (wireless > extensions) with anything but hostapd. Ugh. I was afraid you were going to say that. > > Userspace tools. I want to proceed as if Wireless Extensions never > > existed. Is that even possible? > > No, it's not. My fault for assuming too much about the urgency to get away from WE. > Yes, it should, and nl80211 even supports it, but iw itself doesn't yet. > That's fairly easy to fix, too, but then iw won't support actually > telling mac80211 to scan and associate etc. Right. I had a few early problems with iw. For instance, the Linux Wireless web pages say you need "at least" libnl-1.0-pre8, but it won't build with libnl-1.2 or 2.0. I had to go with libnl-1.1 to make it happy. iw seems to be like a redheaded stepchild. > If you're writing a mac80211-based driver, there's no point where you > could possibly get in touch with the userspace API. You're writing the > driver completely to mac80211's internal driver API, and mac80211 > completely shields you from the userspace API. You'll never interact > with either wireless extensions or nl80211. > > > If somone could answer only 1 question (okay, it's a two-parter) the one > > I would most like answered is this: How does one, from userspace, ask > > the driver to switch to a specific channel, and what callback(s) from > > mac80211 should my driver expect to receive as a result? > > iwconfig wlan0 channel 7 > > then mac80211 calls your _ops->config() with the channel flag. Have you > looked at the mac80211 book and the other documentation on > http://wireless.kernel.org/? That's what I thought but I wasn't seeing any callbacks at all through my ieee80211_ops pointers. I did see the channel frequency change with 'iwconfig wlan0', but no callbacks. My fault, again, for not RTFM. I haven't gotten to the point yet on my driver where I expect 'ip link set up dev wlan0' (or 'ifconfig wlan0 up', if you prefer) and now I see that's why the config callback never happened. If I had RTFM I might have noticed adding 'commit' at the end of the iwconfig command would have done it without the 'up'. Thanks for the info, Johannes. It answers a lot of my questions. -- Dan -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Access your email from home and the web -- 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
