Hi Johannes, > > there can be always a situation where this ends up badly. You tell the > > hardware that it can sleep now, but then you change your mind because > > userspace finally got its act together. Bad luck. > > Right. > > > My point here is only that if the hardware needs a certain amount of > > time before it makes sense to sleep, it should just tell mac80211 this > > and it should be honored. > > I don't really see how that makes sense though. Why would the hardware > "need[] a certain amount of time before it makes sense to sleep"? How > would it not make sense to go to sleep whenever possible, right away, > however long the hardware needs to actually go to sleep then? > > Yes, it's possible that the hardware takes a little while to wake up > again, but we can only account for that if we can predict when we need > to wake up again in the future, but we definitely can't. So yes, while > it doesn't make sense to tell the hw we're idle when we will only be > idle for 50ms and the hw needs 30 to go into idle and 30 to get out of > it, I'm not sure how telling it that it needs 30ms will help mac80211. > Going to idle and coming out of it is meant to be synchronous, so > mac80211 will always wait for the driver to finish that operation. > > > The default should be that we try how good the hardware can handle > > mac80211 being aggressive with switching to idle. Maybe auth/assoc is a > > special case anyway and we should have a sensible timeout value. We > > could ask userspace to tell use that value when doing auth, but that > > feels kinda ugly to me. > > Being idle between auth and assoc probably is a special case, yeah. So > far iwlwifi has handled it just fine for me though, so I'm inclined to > not worry about it too much. Well, with the race fix... I am all for just trying and then actually see if hardware falls over, because we are too aggressive. However you asked about it in the first place, and got my comment ;) Regards Marcel -- 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
