On Thu, 2009-06-25 at 21:37 +0100, Dave wrote: > Do we need to maintain these interfaces? I think allowing the same > functionality via other means should be acceptable (since any software > using these interfaces clearly doesn't work with any other hardware). True. > > Hm, which ones? > > orinoco has the following private wext handlers: > > reset firmware > reset card > get/set adhoc port > get/set short preamble > get/set ibss port > get rid > > I've only ever had occasion to use the reset ioctls recently, when my > card started seriously misbehaving (I suspect it's about to fail). > debugfs or something? Sounds appropriate. > The get/set things could be done as module parameters. Preferred values > will be model/fw specific - though I expect we have reasonable defaults > picked during initialisation. That too. > Get RID reads settings off the card. Useful for debugging or reverse > engineering, but I hope no-one uses it for anything else. Remove completely? I suspect you can get rid of it, yes. > Regarding patch 11 (the internalise one), would it be better to: > * continue to export cfg80211_wext_* for now > * set mac80211s dev->wireless_handler to &cfg80211_wext_handler in > iface.c (via a #define that's NULL if !CONFIG_WEXT) > * specify a release when we expect all drivers, or at least those > anyone cares about, to have converted? Sure. I don't think we need to specify a release since there's only three drivers so far -- orinoco, rndis and iwm. The latter is taken care of, and the two others shouldn't be much of a problem either. > That removes the WE dependency from mac80211 but allows drivers to > gradually implement cfg80211 support. I originally attempted doing it in > one hit - that sucked, but may have been due to not having a clear idea > of how cfg80211 is supposed to work. Yeah, I agree, doing it in one go will probably overwork anyone who attempts it, otoh once we actually convert everything in the tree all the remaining drivers will have to be done in one go. So I think we should just wait until all drivers are converted and then simply swap. I can help with rndis/orinoco too. > It also means orinoco can keep its wext private functions for a bit longer. Yes. Mind you, I was not only talking about iwpriv, but also about things like orinoco's spy support or get/set sensitivity. The latter we don't quite understand -- can you tell us what it actually does? Spy support should just be removed, I think. Additionally, at the wireless summit today (yesterday by the time you read this) we decided to allow cfg80211 drivers to continue exporting iwpriv handlers, so that existing factory calibration interfaces or similar can be maintained going forward even with future drivers. However, this is understood to be purely for backward compatibility with existing calibration or similar tools. johannes
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