on radio_enabled

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

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Hi!

So I was looking through various drivers, and not all of them are able
to handle radio_enabled gracefully.

iwlwifi, for instance, turns off the radio but then is unable to fulfil
any configuration requests coming in while the radio is disabled.

The same is true, if I remember correctly what Ivo told me, for rt2x00.

It is not true for b43/legacy, for example, which leaves the MAC running
and thus can configure everything even if the radio is disabled.
Similarly for Atheros hw, I think.

Now, if we're going to use radio_enabled more, I wonder whether we
should completely deconfigure the hardware when we want to turn off
radio_enabled, and then completely reconfigure it once we enable the
radio again.

Pros:
 * configures all hardware correctly without the driver needing to do
   everything by itself
 * works with all hardware for sure

Cons:
 * higher latency

Also, sometimes we may want to disable the radio for just short periods
of time, I think, for regulatory compliance? 11h or so? How's that
handled, or rather supposed to be?

johannes

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