Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751676AbaLaWaZ (ORCPT ); Wed, 31 Dec 2014 17:30:25 -0500 Received: from mail-gw3-out.broadcom.com ([216.31.210.64]:30320 "EHLO mail-gw3-out.broadcom.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751599AbaLaWaP (ORCPT ); Wed, 31 Dec 2014 17:30:15 -0500 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="5.07,675,1413270000"; d="scan'208";a="53862042" Message-ID: <54A478F3.4090602@broadcom.com> Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 23:30:11 +0100 From: Arend van Spriel User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.16 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Theodore Ts'o" , Jiri Kosina , "Grumbach, Emmanuel" , Linus Torvalds , Borislav Petkov , "linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , "egrumbach@gmail.com" , "peter@hurleysoftware.com" , "ilw@linux.intel.com" , "Berg, Johannes" , Larry Finger Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable" References: <54A328C2.5080606@lwfinger.net> <54A3D955.6020809@broadcom.com> <0BA3FCBA62E2DC44AF3030971E174FB31B5DD72E@hasmsx107.ger.corp.intel.com> <54A3E1F1.7030807@broadcom.com> <54A41000.3040306@broadcom.com> <20141231173113.GA443@thunk.org> <54A45D4D.7070302@broadcom.com> <20141231214421.GA29273@thunk.org> In-Reply-To: <20141231214421.GA29273@thunk.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2266 Lines: 59 On 12/31/14 22:44, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 09:32:13PM +0100, Arend van Spriel wrote: >> >> Agree. I can't even recall using "ip" ever. iw help system does provide >> command specific help. The phy keyword is both a command and a selector key, >> which I realize is confusing to the user, eg. 'iw help info' does provide >> help for the 'info' subcommand. > > Yeah, the confusing part is that "ip" tends to use "verb object" > scheme, which is consistent with the Cisco IOS command set it was > trying to emulate. So for ip, you do something like > > ip link info eth0 > > Where as for "iw" it's almost exactly backwards, i.e.: > > iw wlan0 info > > It's actually rather unfortunate that there is no consistency between > many of these tools, for example: > > ethtool --show-features eth0 > > If we were going to create a new interface, wouldn't be nice if we > could have some kind of consistency? Sigh; oh well, water under the > bridge at this point. And on that water there are different ships with different captains ;-) >> Thanks. If there are still drivers, upstream or out-of-tree, providing only >> WEXT API this will not work unless iwconfig/iwlist can distinguish those >> from cfg80211-based drivers (which is possible) and fallback to WEXT ioctl >> syscalls. Just not sure if it is worth the effort. As you stated below, it >> does not seem "evil" to retain WEXT if that is providing users what they >> need. > > Is it really that much effort? Unless there is some license > incompatibility nonsense (i.e., GPLv2 vs GPLv3), the code's already > there in the wireless-tools source. It would just be a matter of > trying the new ioctls first, and then falling back to the WEXT ones if > needed, right? I don't think it is much effort. I think the nl80211 netlink api is not an ioctl, but yeah it seems trivial. But if WEXT needs to stay for people using WEXT-only drivers, it may be fine to keep cfg80211 wext compatibility in place. Regards, Arend > Cheers, > > - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/