Re: questions regarding removing the depencency on CONFIG_IEEE80211

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 17:59 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > I was thinking about lib80211 this morning too; specifically the code
> > that everyone has to write to convert local BSS entries into WEXT scan
> > results.  The problem is that drivers have different ideas of what a BSS
> > is.  I think the _first_ thing to do is to define a BSS structure (I
> > used the ipw2x00 bss structure in libertas when doing this) that all the
> > fullmac drivers can use (airo, atmel, libertas, orinoco, etc).  Then,
> > each driver can fill out that structure from it's internal scan result,
> > and hand that off to the lib80211 bss list handling code.  We could have
> > a help that these driver's get_scan calls to convert the internal list
> > into WEXT scan results.  The important thing is getting these drivers to
> > fill out the common bss structure when their firmware returns a scan
> > result.  We could even make the lib80211 code handle scan result aging
> > internally.  Could have helper functions to allocate and dispose of the
> > bss list instead of having to duplicate that code in every driver (it's
> > already in airo & libertas, and I posted a patch that dupes it again for
> > orinoco).
> 
> Sounds good though I think this in particular is cfg80211 functionality
> because over time that will want to export scan results via nl80211 too.

Good point; that might be a great way to move forward and start getting
cfg80211 functionality into the fullmac drivers.

Dan