Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S265492AbUFCEGw (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Jun 2004 00:06:52 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265493AbUFCEGw (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Jun 2004 00:06:52 -0400 Received: from parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk ([195.92.249.252]:58069 "EHLO www.linux.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S265492AbUFCEGu (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Jun 2004 00:06:50 -0400 Message-ID: <40BEA3CB.60908@pobox.com> Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:06:35 -0400 From: Jeff Garzik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jouni Malinen CC: "Luis R. Rodriguez" , Netdev , hostap@shmoo.com, prism54-devel@prism54.org, Jean Tourrilhes , Linux Kernel Subject: Re: Prism54 WPA Support - wpa_supplicant - Linux general wpa support References: <20040602071449.GJ10723@ruslug.rutgers.edu> <20040602132313.GB7341@jm.kir.nu> In-Reply-To: <20040602132313.GB7341@jm.kir.nu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1551 Lines: 37 Jouni Malinen wrote: > The first thing I would like to see is an addition to Linux wireless > extensions for WPA/WPA2 so that we can get rid of the private ioctls in > the drivers. Even though these can often be similar, it would be nice to > just write one driver interface code in wpa_supplicant and have it > working with all Linu drivers.. I hope to find some time to write a > proposal for this. One of the things that is nice about wireless-2.6 is that is affords the opportunity to totally rethink the wireless extensions. Although a lot of people would howl, since HostAP is essentially new code from the mainline kernel perspective, a new userland API (and new or updated tools) could come along with it. I have mentioned in the past (no offense Jean!) that I do not like the overly-generic wireless handler structure. It is less type-safe than is generally preferred in Linux, IMO. A low-level wireless driver should not implement ioctls, it should implement callbacks in some sort of 'struct wireless_operations' as is done in other kernel subsystems. ioctl details should be hidden from low-level drivers as much as possible, through type-safe interfaces. Strive to make both the wireless driver API and the wireless userland API easy to change and evolve over time. Jeff - 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/