Hi,
Netdevs have a get_stats method which is used to return a
net_device_stats struct up to the stack.
The old ieee80211 stack provides a net_device_stats to the drivers, and
handles the get_stats internally. zd1211rw-softmac then manipulates the
following fields directly:
tx_dropped
tx_retry_limit_exceeded
rx_dropped
rx_errors
rx_missed_errors
rx_fifo_errors
rx_crc_errors
rx_length_errors
I'm interested in porting this functionality over to zd1211rw-mac80211
but this looks like a bigger task than it sounds.
mac80211 does implement a get_stats internally (per-interface) but
doesn't expose the net_device_stats structure passed back to drivers.
So, how do we expose this?
One idea is to pass a pointer to the net_device_stats structure to the
TX handler, so the driver can manipulate it in the TX handler:
2 problems here though:
1. doesn't cover the RX error reporting part
2. not all TX failures are reported from the TX handler
(e.g. the excessive retry one comes a long time later, based on an
interrupt from a different endpoint)
Another idea: add an error field to the ieee80211_tx_status structure,
with values like TX_ERROR_EXCESSIVE_RETRIES, TX_ERROR_OTHER. Make the
ieee80211_tx_status() function interpret these values and update the
net_device_stats accordingly. Additionally, add an error field to
ieee80211_rx_status, and add more logic to ieee80211_rx_status().
Issues here:
1. ieee80211_tx_status() doesn't know which interface is being
reported about, so it wouldn't know which net_device_stats to update.
2. ieee80211_rx_status() semantics would change. Currently, if we
discard a RX frame, we don't call that function at all. We'd have to
make it accept a NULL skb if the error field in the ieee80211_rx_status
structure is set, or something like that.
For (1), we could pass the if_id to the TX handler. But then comes the
issue where zd1211rw wants to report TX errors from outside the TX
handler. I'd have to store the if_id in a structure somewhere, based on
the knowledge that we'll only ever have one STA interface.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Daniel