Re: [Orinoco-devel] Agere PCMCIA sometimes takes very long time to associate with 9.48 FW

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 10:01 +0000, Dave wrote:
> John W. Linville wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:15:47AM +0300, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
> > 
> >> - we should not be doing it in ->open. It is technically legal to set
> >> wireless parameters before "icfonfig up" and we lose all of them. I will
> >> try next week with similar patch in orinoco_stop().
> > 
> > That seems wrong...
> > 
> >> - I am still not even sure we should do it at all. What is sematic of
> >> ifconfig up/down w.r.t. wireless parameters? I.e. is "ifconfig down"
> >> expected to clean all device state and start from scratch?
> > 
> > No.  Unfortunately, it is mostly a matter of opinion as to what
> > wireless extensions expects.
> 
> Agreed with all the above. I'll discard the driver patch.
> 
> There are two other things I can think of:
> 
> 1. make sure wpa_supplicant is shut down before ifconfig ethX down, and
> restart it on resume.

Drivers shouldn't really care about what userspace is driving them; they
need to either return an error for invalid requests, or handle the
request.  Userspace (wpa_supplicant) then needs to be smart enough to
know about device events, which it already does.

> From the data you've provided it looks like your distribution brings the
> device down, but may leave wpa_supplicant running. I've noticed that

That's still a valid case that both the driver and supplicant should
handle.

> every time wpa_supplicant shuts down it removes most configuration
> settings. Or has that changed?

Hasn't changed, on shutdown the supplicant will clear keys and reset
countermeasures and whatnot.

> 2. Does the driver need to send a dissociation event (or something) to
> userspace on ifconfig down?

If the association with the AP is no longer valid, then yes.  Most of
the other drivers do this already, I think.

Dan