Re: [PATCH 00/13] o11s: mesh interface support for mac80211

[Luis Carlos Cobo <luisca@cozybit.com>]

On Thu, 2008-02-07 at 01:13 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > - Scan support: we were waiting for scan to be moved to cfg80211 to avoid
> >   messing unnecessarily with wext, is there any effort in this direction?
> 
> What specifically do you need? Scanning for mesh networks? Wouldn't a
> regular scan find them as well? As far as I know nobody is currently
> working on scan support in nl80211. Maybe you can simply report the
> relevant mesh IEs in a custom element and sort it out in userspace (for
> now)?

Currently, bss are sorted by ssid, bssid and frequency. In mesh beacons
and (not yet implemented) mesh probes, the bssid is left zeroed and
there is no ssid (actually there is a 0 length ssid IE), so all mesh
networks in a single channel would collapse to one scan entry. I can add
the mesh IE, but I also need a substitute for those.

One option would be to use mesh id as bssid and source address as bssid
(with this we would get a different entry for every mesh peer in rage,
not sure if that's what we want), maybe set the mode to IW_MODE_ADHOC
and add the extra mesh IE. This way we would not need changes in the
wireless extesions layer.

I am also curious about the interfaces life cycle. Looks like interfaces
report any available network (infra or adhoc), regardless their type.
Then a network-manager-like interface would have to bring up an
interface to be able to scan, and the if the user chooses a different
kind of network (if the interface where the scan is performed is infra
but the user chooses an ad-hoc network), change the type of the
interface and the proceed to connect. Am I right?

-- 
Luis Carlos Cobo Rus       GnuPG ID: 44019B60
cozybit Inc.