Re: [RFC] ath9k: fix listening to idle requests

[Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan <vasanth@atheros.com>]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 08:08:22PM +0530, Luis Rodriguez wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan
> <vasanth@atheros.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 02:22:26AM +0530, Luis Rodriguez wrote:
> >> The way idle configuration detection was implemented as
> >> busted due to the fact that it assumed the ath9k virtual wiphy,
> >> the aphy, would be marked as inactive if it was not used but
> >> it turns out an aphy is always active if its the only wiphy
> >> present. We need to distinguish between aphy activity and
> >> idleness so we now add an idle bool for the aphy and mark
> >> it as such based on the passed IEEE80211_CONF_CHANGE_IDLE
> >> from mac80211.
> >>
> >> Previous to all_wiphys_idle would never be true when using
> >> only one device so we never really were using
> >> IEEE80211_CONF_CHANGE_IDLE -- we never turned the radio
> >> off or on upon IEEE80211_CONF_CHANGE_IDLE changes as radio
> >> changes depended on all_wiphys_idle being true either to
> >> turn the radio on or off. Since it was always false for
> >> one device this code was doing nothing.
> >>
> >> Reported-by: Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan <vasanth@atheros.com>
> >> Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <lrodriguez@atheros.com>
> >> ---
> >>
> >> Vasanth, what do you think?
> >
> > Still we will have issue when bringing up a sec wiphy while the
> > primary wiphy is in idle state. ath9k_start() does not brought up
> > the newly created wiphy interface when the state of at least one
> > previously created interface is in ACTIVE state. Unless already
> > brought up interfaces are put down we hit this situation whenever
> > we try to bring up a new secondary wiphy interface. So with this
> > patch the actual h/w will remain radio disabled state even after
> > a new interface is in active state. We need to bring the h/w into
> > active state if all old interfaces are in idle state in
> > ath9k_start().
> 
> I don't see what prevents a secondary virtual wiphy from getting the
> radio started -- perhaps I'm missing something. When a virtual wiphy
> needs to become non-idle that'll come from the mac80211 non-idle
> config call and that will find that one device is non-idle and hence
> start it.

mac80211 will issue config() for non-idle only when the respective
wiphy is already put into idle state.

Vasanth