Re: [PATCH] mac80211: re-upload keys only after telling driver about association

reinette chatre
2009-04-10T15:59:42Z

Hi Johannes,

On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 00:29 -0700, Johannes Berg wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:55 -0700, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > > In the normal WPA or RSN case keys are only configured after
> > > associating, so we should do that in that order when resuming
> > > as well. It shouldn't really matter since we do not send any
> > > data at either point, but iwlwifi prefers it this way and it
> > > does seem more natural.
> >
> > Could you please share the symptom of the problem with iwlwifi without
> > this patch?
>
> [this is just a snippet from my other mail -- for the wider audience]
>
>
> When you have a microcode error, we pretty much take the driver
> completely down, and the firmware is of course completely
> re-initialised. Now, when mac80211 goes to reconfigure the hardware, it
> would, before this patch, do this [simplified, but you can look at the
> code]:
> 1) ->start()
> 2) ->add_interface()
> 3) ->sta_notify() [which iwlwifi doesn't use]
> 4) ->set_key()
> 5) ->bss_info_changed()
>
> and some more. Now, because iwlwifi ignores step 3, in step 4 it will
> complain "station not found" when mac80211 wants to add the pairwise key
> for the AP. Reordering 4 and 5 fixes that because iwlwifi adds the
> station in bss_info_changed and then the key upload can be successful.

Thank you very much for these details. I was really hoping that this may
have something to do with our latest kerneloops.org attention, but it
does not from what I can tell.

Reinette