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From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 08:37:11 -0800
Message-ID: <AANLkTimimuho23cY7LR+HN0+VXf4Xo+i4S8EHHz3ORhK@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Support for Android for mac80211 / cfg80211 802.11 drivers
To: Jouni Malinen <j@w1.fi>
Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>,
	Bob Copeland <me@bobcopeland.com>,
	linux-wireless <linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Amod Bodas <Amod.Bodas@atheros.com>,
	Senthilkumar Balasubramanian
	<Senthilkumar.Balasubramanian@atheros.com>,
	Sree Durbha <Sree.Durbha@atheros.com>,
	Deepak Dhamdhere <Deepak.Dhamdhere@atheros.com>,
	Xin Jin <Xin.Jin@atheros.com>
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Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Jouni Malinen <j@w1.fi> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 12:33:54PM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
>> What's the driver_cmd things they use? If we they add support for
>> whatever it is to nl80211, why can those not be normal supplicant
>> interfaces?
>
> I have not reviewed what exactly gets used and how, so this is only
> based on what the modification for wpa_supplicant are exposing.
>
> There seems to be some kind of mechanism for stopping/starting/reloading
> the driver which I do not fully understand. It includes some kind of
> driver hang detection and maybe recovery from that etc..
>
> Then there is a very generic mechanism of passing any command from user
> space (i.e., command string to a SIOCSIWPRIV) and that goes
> transparently through wpa_supplicant.. The response comes back as a
> string. In other words, you could implement pretty much anything in a
> driver specific way with that.. At least following commands are used or
> have used with that: RSSI, LINKSPEED, MACADDR, GETPOWER, GETBAND.
>
> Since it is difficult to tell just from wpa_supplicant changes what
> exactly is done with these interfaces, the answer to the question of
> why these could not be normal supplicant interfaces is not immediately
> clear to me. I would assume that some of this functionality could
> certainly be added once identified clearly what is needed. Some may
> already be available (like MACADDR; assuming it is used to fetch local
> MAC address).

Sounds like Android kernel guys need to get their shit together. Why
is this so hard?

  Luis