Re: [PATCH 12/14] mac80211: 802.11w - Optional software CCMP for management frames

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1231 bytes --]

On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 14:18 +0200, Jouni Malinen wrote:

> Agreed and it should be relatively small change in wpa_supplicant, so
> I'm not against doing this. However, at this point I would not yet
> recommend trying to use driver_nl80211 as the first option. Once we get
> nl80211 bit more complete and at least make sure it does not break
> something, adding the automatic driver selection would sound more
> reasonable. Though, this would also mean that we depend on drivers never
> implementing partial nl80211 support that could trigger wpa_supplicant
> into believing that they support nl80211 when they would actually work
> much better with wext.

That's not _much_ of a problem, considering that driver_nl80211 is using
wext, and cfg80211 will continue providing wext calls. Therefore, older
versions of wpa_supplicant will continue working on newer kernel
versions that have more stuff in nl80211 rather than wext, the only
problem could come up when using a "too new" wpa_supplicant on an older
kernel with older nl80211. That's easy to detect though by checking
which commands nl80211 supports, and refusing to work with it unless all
commands that driver_nl80211 needs are implemented.

johannes

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 836 bytes --]