Re: [PATCH wireless-next 0/6] Consolidate Michael MIC code into mac80211

Eric Biggers
2026-04-07T06:16:25Z

On Tue, Apr 07, 2026 at 08:00:53AM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> The one thing that feels odd to me in this is moving it to *mac80211*
> specifically, and then using that in the ancient drivers. Not only is
> that a big module those don't (otherwise) need, but also it makes it
> look like you need the softmac stack for those drivers, but they're
> really hardmac so that's a bit confusing.
>
> I wouldn't want to have a separate module just for this, but I think
> since it's going to be exported anyway, we could move the whole
> michael.c file to net/wireless/ and make it part of cfg80211. All
> wireless drivers ought to depend on that anyway.

Just to clarify, mac80211 already contains the michael_mic() function.
And every driver that needs Michael MIC already depends on mac80211
except for ipw2x00. So bloat-wise I assumed it's probably better to
make that one driver depend on mac80211, rather than make every driver
pull in the Michael MIC code (by moving it from mac80211 to cfg80211).
But if you prefer that the code be in cfg80211 we can do it that way.

- Eric