Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] mac80211: Possibility for driver to get AP probereq template

[Juuso Oikarinen <juuso.oikarinen@nokia.com>]

On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 13:35 +0200, ext Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 14:27 +0300, juuso.oikarinen@nokia.com wrote:
> > From: Juuso Oikarinen <juuso.oikarinen@nokia.com>
> > 
> > The wl1271 has hardware connection monitoring, i.e. the hardware chipset 
> > internally handles periodic null-funcs and probe-req transmitting in case of
> > non-acked periodic null-func or beacon loss.
> 
> I'm wondering why it wants to do probe-req instead of nullfunc? I mean,
> we're trying to make mac80211 use nullfunc+ACK instead of probereq
> +proberesp ...

The wl1271 actually uses null-funcs for the periodic stuff.

Only when the null-func fails, or it misses a specific number of
consecutive beacons, it will transmit a probe-request to the AP in a
final attempt to re-sync before indicating connection loss to the host.

The thing with the wl1271 is, that we cannot disable the probe-req. If
we don't configure a template for it, it will transmit garbage upon
losing connection with the AP.

Why it uses a probe-request as the final means to resync, I'm not sure.

-Juuso