Return-path: Received: from mail-wi0-f172.google.com ([209.85.212.172]:51480 "EHLO mail-wi0-f172.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751877Ab2HWGuH (ORCPT ); Thu, 23 Aug 2012 02:50:07 -0400 Received: by wicr5 with SMTP id r5so616816wic.1 for ; Wed, 22 Aug 2012 23:50:05 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <503540FC.9030408@openwrt.org> References: <20120820111321.71c6f07e@mj> <503540FC.9030408@openwrt.org> From: Sergey Ryazanov Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2012 10:49:45 +0400 Message-ID: (sfid-20120823_085012_267405_B662EAAE) Subject: Re: Per sta interfaces in WDS (4-address) mode To: Felix Fietkau Cc: Pavel Roskin , linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Pavel, Felix thanks for the quick response. Appears that I missed the discussion of this solution. 2012/8/23 Felix Fietkau : > On 2012-08-20 5:13 PM, Pavel Roskin wrote: >> On Sun, 19 Aug 2012 21:51:27 +0400 >> Sergey Ryazanov wrote: >> >>> Hello dear all, >>> >>> please tell me, why in the WDS mode, the stack creates a new interface >>> for each WDS station, and this interface hostapd adds to the parent AP >>> interface bridge? Why we couldn't simply pass this frames via AP >>> interface? >> >> You may want to use a completely different IP address and netmask on the >> WDS interface. Using the AP interface would take away that option. >> >> hostapd is not a part of the kernel. It should be possible not to add >> WDS interfaces to the bridge. > It's not just that. If the WDS station communication were done over the > AP interface, mac80211 would have to keep a table of which MAC address > is reachable behind which WDS station, which is something that the > bridge layer is supposed to do. > I've seen such a design mistake in various drivers, and I've seen the > weird quirks that this usually produces in more complex network > topologies ;) > Implementing WDS support directly in the driver (or stack) - it is really a complex task. Several years ago, had to spend a lot of time catching bugs in the madwifi code. But when we use virtual interfaces and generic bridge there a few questions. 1. How to isolate the clients and hosts behind them? 2. How to tag outgoing packets with 802.1Q tags? If we do: ip link add link wlan0 name wlan0.15 type vlan id 15 it will only tagged packets going directly to client stations, but not to hosts behind them. -- BR Sergey