Re: [RFC] cfg80211: Advertise maximum associated STAs in AP mode

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Tue, 2014-01-07 at 18:38 +0200, Jouni Malinen wrote:

> > > P2P has a P2P Group Limit field which the GO uses to
> > > advertise in Beacon/Probe Response frames to indicate that no more P2P
> > > Clients can join the group. wpa_supplicant supports this functionality,
> > > but currently, requires user (or well, whoever is building the system)
> > > to configure the maximum limit. This is an extra complexity that could
> > > be easily avoided for cases where the driver were able to advertise the
> > > maximum number of associated stations.
> > 
> > Right, indeed. That does indicate a need for such a limit. I wonder if a
> > more dynamic approach (such as an event saying 'I just ran out of
> > space') would be preferable? But it'd obviously be far more complex, so
> > may not be worth it.
> 
> That would allow the specific (and only clearly known today, I guess)
> use case of P2P GO to be addressed. Or well, this would actually require
> even more complexity, since there would also need to be another event to
> indicate that more space become available (another operation stopped)..

Yeah, too much complexity.

> While I'm not against adding this type of functionality, I'm not sure it
> really would be worth the effort and it would be yet another alternative
> since there is already support for maximum station count in
> hostapd/wpa_supplicant even if that currently happens to depend on
> manual configuration. The case of add-sta failing will obviously need to
> be supported cleanly, so we (or well, I at least ;-) are pretty much
> stuck with having at least those two.. Adding a third one sounds a bit
> much.

I agree. I think this patch is fine, but I'd like to see this documented
with the slightly relaxed semantics, i.e. documenting that it is fine in
practice to set this a bit too high where it can't be known or station
entries are shared. Given that is actually OK, of course, which I think
we said it would be.

johannes