Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 11:55:50 -0700
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Cc: Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>,
       "John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>,
       Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>,
       Alessandro Suardi <alessandro.suardi@gmail.com>, hostap@shmoo.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, ipw3945-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing
Message-ID: <20061002185550.GA14854@bougret.hpl.hp.com>
Reply-To: jt@hpl.hp.com
References: <20061002085942.GA32387@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> <5a4c581d0610020221s7bf100f8q893161b7c8c492d2@mail.gmail.com> <20061002113259.GA8295@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> <5a4c581d0610020521q721e3157q88ad17d3cc84a066@mail.gmail.com> <20061002124613.GB13984@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> <20061002165053.GA2986@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> <1159808304.2834.89.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20061002111537.baa077d2.akpm@osdl.org>
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From: Jean Tourrilhes <jt@hpl.hp.com>
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On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:15:37AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:58:24 -0400
> > 
> > You have a mismatch between your wireless-tools, your kernel, and/or
> > wpa_supplicant.  WE-21 uses the _real_ ssid length rather than the
> > kludge of hacking off the last byte used previously.  Please ensure that
> > your tools, driver, and kernel are using WE-21.
> > 'cat /proc/net/wireless' should tell you what your kernel is using.
> > Getting the driver WE is a bit harder and you may have to look at the
> > source.
> 
> Jean, John: the amount of trouble which this change is causing is quite
> high considering that we're not even at -rc1 yet.  It's going to get worse.

	We have to split between the different issues we have seen.
	Tools issue (the wpa_supplicant problem). -> those can only be
fixed by people upgrading. Fortunately, there are not so many tools
affected, and new version of those tools were released last
April/May. As I said, most distro have those in the pipe.
	In-Kernel driver issues (the Orinoco driver problem). -> those
can be patched and fixed as we go along. I would not worry about
those.
	Out-of-kernel issues (the ipw3945 driver problem). -> those
drivers need to be updated. That's the problem of living outside the
kernel. Very often those drivers are reactive with respect to kernel
API changes, rather than pro-active, so there is not much we can do.

> It doesn't sound like it'll be too hard to arrange for the kernel to
> continue to work correctly with old userspace?

	Actually, it's impossible. New userspace can work across both
version, old userspace fails on new version.

	The whole point of the -rc process is to find problems and the
scope of it, there is no way I can know everything. At this point, we
can decide if WE-21 should go in 2.6.19 or wait for 2.6.20. But I know
that most Linux-Wireless people such as Dan and Jouni have been
waiting impatiently for those changes...

	Have fun...

	Jean
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