Here I want to ask and summarize problems we found in thread 'driver_nl80211 broken again' First of all it it known that lifetime of connection to access point is typically: authentication request/response association request/response EAPOL 4 way handshake (for WPA) <session> disassociation deauthentication Today kernel explicitly requests the driver to perform both disassociation and deauthentication in that order. It is also possible to do disassociation and then association, skipping the authentication step. However, currently wpa_supplicant assumes that once it called wpa_drv_disassociate it can again start the complete connect sequence from the authentication. In fact I have carefully studied the code and found that calls to wpa_supplicant_deauthenticate (which is the only user of wpa_drv_deauthenticate) only happen at deinitialization of wireless interface and when wpa_supplicant really has to do it, that is if there is a failure (mic failure for example). My hacky patch that was rejected on the grounds that it is not right to introduce the driver dependent behavior might actually be the correct solution. It just makes the wpa_supplicant_disassociate do both disassociation and deauthentication, as was always assumed by the wpa_supplicant core. Or kernel should became smarter and do the work for wpa_supplicant. In this case it should work like that: If mac80211 is already authenticated to the AP that was requested, it should just return success. However currently (and I was told that this is feature, not a bug) mac80211 would flatly refuse to do any scanning while it is in authenticated but not associated state. If it isn't authenticated to new AP then, new authentication should be made. (and old one can be kept, but removed after a timeout) And the last question. When do you plan to switch officially the wpa_supplicant to driver_nl80211? Currently it has this issue, and another issue that it (nl80211) reports signal levels in another format that NetworkManager doesn't understand. Other that that it is faster, and especially it allows me to bring network up, when I press rfkill button within 4 seconds or less. Best regards, Maxim Levitsky -- 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
