nl80211 vendor commands on upstream drivers

nl80211 vendor commands on upstream drivers

[Kalle Valo]

Hi,

last fall at Wireless Summit at Santa Fe we talked about having nl80211
vendor commands in upstream drivers[1]. The discussion starter was this
wil6210 patch:

wil6210: low level RF sector API
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9403071/

The conclusion from the discussion was that in some (rare) cases having
vendor commands in upstream is acceptable, for example like here when
interfacing low level hw features which most likely is not not
compatible with other designs.

But this does not mean that the gates are open for all possible hacks
via vendor commands, we still want to have generic nl80211 interface for
all normal functionality. Just to give some examples of something which
is NOT acceptable:

* yet another scanning interface (exception maybe being spectral scan?)
* power save settings
* btcoex settings

Comments? Am I forgetting something from the discussion?

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vQXbVQ-3zQt3Bcr3OWfwzbw_C49tTvf0ed8Hmf7b20E6tXc3a40tWZmPku49iGDE-OhgxNmO_lkkHEn/pub

-- 
Kalle Valo

Re: nl80211 vendor commands on upstream drivers

[Johannes Berg]

On Fri, 2017-05-12 at 16:51 +0300, Kalle Valo wrote:
> 
> But this does not mean that the gates are open for all possible hacks
> via vendor commands, we still want to have generic nl80211 interface
> for all normal functionality. Just to give some examples of something
> which is NOT acceptable:

[snip scanning]

> * power save settings
> * btcoex settings

I'm starting to think that these might really be a vendor API for
anything but the most basic features - there's so much variation here
now.

OTOH, much of these shouldn't really be something the user needs to
twiddle with anyway.

> Comments? Am I forgetting something from the discussion?

I think that's a good summary.

johannes

Re: nl80211 vendor commands on upstream drivers

[Kalle Valo]

Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> writes:

> On Fri, 2017-05-12 at 16:51 +0300, Kalle Valo wrote:
>> 
>> But this does not mean that the gates are open for all possible hacks
>> via vendor commands, we still want to have generic nl80211 interface
>> for all normal functionality. Just to give some examples of something
>> which is NOT acceptable:
>
> [snip scanning]
>
>> * power save settings
>> * btcoex settings
>
> I'm starting to think that these might really be a vendor API for
> anything but the most basic features - there's so much variation here
> now.
>
> OTOH, much of these shouldn't really be something the user needs to
> twiddle with anyway.

Yeah, for example power save is something which should just work. But
btcoex settings so seem to be quite hairy sometimes, so maybe a vendor
interface is justifiable. Dunno.

-- 
Kalle Valo