Hi Alexander, alex.aring@xxxxxxxxx wrote on Tue, 28 Dec 2021 17:22:38 -0500: > Hi, > > On Wed, 22 Dec 2021 at 10:57, Miquel Raynal <miquel.raynal@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Let's introduce the basics of PAN management: > > - structures defining PANs > > - helpers for PANs registration > > - helpers discarding old PANs > > > > I think there exists a little misunderstanding about how the > architecture is between the structures wpan_phy, wpan_dev and > cfg802154. > > - wpan_phy: represents the PHY layer of IEEE 802154 and is a > registered device class. > - wpan_dev: represents the MAC layer of IEEE 802154 and is a netdev interface. > > You can have multiple wpan_dev operate on one wpan_phy. To my best > knowledge it's like having multiple access points running on one phy > (wireless) or macvlan on ethernet. You can actually do that with the > mac802154_hwsim driver. However as there exists currently no (as my > knowledge) hardware which supports e.g. multiple address filters we > wanted to be prepared for to support such handling. Although, there > exists some transceivers which support something like a "pan bridge" > which goes into such a direction. > > What is a cfg802154 registered device? Well, at first it offers an > interface between SoftMAC and HardMAC from nl802154, that's the > cfg802154_ops structure. In theory a HardMAC transceiver would bypass > the SoftMAC stack by implementing "cfg802154_ops" on the driver layer > and try to do everything there as much as possible to support it. It > is not a registered device class but the instance is tight to a > wpan_phy. There can be multiple wpan_dev's (MAC layer instances on a > phy/cfg802154 registered device). We currently don't support a HardMAC > transceiver and I think because this misunderstanding came up. Thanks for the explanation, I think it helps because the relationship between wpan_dev and wpan_phy was not yet fully clear to me. In order to clarify further your explanation and be sure that I understand it the correct way, I tried to picture the above explanation into a figure. Would you mind looking at it and tell me if something does not fit? https://bootlin.com/~miquel/ieee802154.pdf Thanks, Miquèl
