Re: [RFC v2] mac80211: add general rate information to Tx status

["Tomas Winkler" <tomasw@gmail.com>]

On Feb 6, 2008 6:28 PM, Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
>
> > Maybe I'm locked in concepts of iwlwifi but I believe also other
> > drivers uses similar concept. I think USB has some URB complete
> > handler etc.  So iwlwifi get interrupt (asynchronous) when packet is
> > transmitted (TX response flow) and driver retrieves the information of
> > transmitting. This is NOT done in TX contexts so you have to store
> > tx_status between TX flows and TX response flow so you can feed it
> > back to ieee80211_tx_status_irqsafe
>
> Ah. But where's the difference between "TX response" and "TX status"
> then?

There are the same, just terminology juggling.

Anyway, yes, you do have to store the info between ->tx() and
> tx_status().
>
> > Not sure which flow will free this pointer ? Iwlwifi keeps tx_status
> > attached to TBD so it have to be sure it won't be overriden somewhere
> > in the stack.  But it might be a case that I'm not understand here
> > something
>
> I'd think that mac80211 would free it. I guess we should then have
> something like
>
> static inline struct ieee80211_tx_status *
> ieee80211_alloc_tx_status(size_t num_rate_ctrl)
> {
>         struct ieee80211_tx_status *s;
>         s = kzalloc(... the expression you had earlier...);
>         if (s)
>                 s->num_rate_control = num_rate_control;
>         return s;
> }

> so that we can change that w/o changing all drivers. In fact, you'd
> probably already allocate that in the TX flow and keep it around until
> TX status.

It's allocated in <bus>_probe stage. The 'dynamic' allocation is done
only by mac in ieee80211_tx_status_irqsafe.


> Mind you, I'm just writing whatever comes to my head ;) Better ideas
> welcome, especially since this makes tx_status_irqsafe() and tx_status()
> behave completely differently.

I prefer to start to converge to something since iwlwifi driver is
broken for week on the tip of everything.

 Incidentally, why does iwlwifi use both
> depending on in_interrupt(), or rather, why isn't the content statically
> known?

Actually in spite of the IF there I don't think  it  ever happens that
iwlwifi uses tx_status() directly only irqsafe. Does any driver uses
tx_status directly anyway?

Tomas

Tomas
> johannes
>