Re: [RFC PATCH v2 4/4] mac80211: add beacon filtering support

[Kalle Valo <kalle.valo@nokia.com>]

Jouni Malinen <j@w1.fi> writes:

>> Other option is that the hardware which does not support checksumming
>> would just pass beacons periodically to the stack, for example every 5
>> seconds. Even though beacon filter is enabled in mac80211 it does not
>> prevent hardware from sending beacons. This is not the most optimal
>> solution, but there's not much choices if the hardware doesn't support
>> checksumming.
>
> While it would be possible to do that, it does not really solve many of
> the use cases where Beacon contents can change and the STA is required
> to take some action. For example, Channel Switch Announcement IEs would
> likely be missed if a Beacon frames is passed through that infrequently.
> I would assume the driver could enable this even if the hardware does
> not use checksumming to detect Beacon changes, but this may severely
> limit functionality in number of cases, so I'm not sure I would
> recommend this to be done in general.

Yes, definitely not recommended. I would classify it to "the ugly
hack" category.

-- 
Kalle Valo