Re: question: crda timeout in cfg80211

[Sergey Matyukevich <sergey.matyukevich.os@quantenna.com>]

> > Indeed, it is PI. I should have known. But instead I spent some time
> > digging through 802.11 specs :)
> 
> Oops :)
> 
> > Well, as I mentioned in my question, regulatory update/reset operations
> > shall be completed in ~pi seconds for _all_ the wireless cards in the
> > system. In our case, regulatory reset operation may be fairly costly.
> > As a result, we end up with recurring reset timeout, when more than one
> > qtn card is installed in a single pcie host. One option for us is to
> > optimize regulatory reset operations in firmware.
> >
> > But what do you think about converting crda_timeout into a per-wiphy
> > timeout in the case when all wiphy-s are being processed, e.g.
> > in update_all_wiphy_regulatory.
> 
> Maybe we should parallelize it? But I don't know how easy that would be.
> 
> I'm a little worried just making it longer will cause users to really be
> wondering what's going on?

Hello Johannes,

Calling regulatory notifiers in parallel sounds like a good idea.
But I haven't yet looked into the details as well. Before fixing
the timeout issue, I was trying to figure out why that regulatory
reset was needed at all.

Here is a simple usecase: Linux distro sets regulatory region to US,
STA is connected to AP. Any STA disconnect (including an attempt to
reconnect to another AP) leads to regulatory reset cycle: US -> 00 -> US.
This reset cycle is not supposed to be done for the wireless cards that
specify REGULATORY_COUNTRY_IE_IGNORE flag. However regulatory reset will
be applied anyway if at least one card in the system does not specify
that flag.

Hence two questions:
Do we really need this kind of reset when we remain
in the same regulatory domain ? 

Does it make sense to track when restore_regulatory_settings performs
reset, and to skip reset for the cards that specify
REGULATORY_COUNTRY_IE_IGNORE ?

Regards,
Sergey