Re: New Regulatory Domain Api.

["Luis R. Rodriguez" <lrodriguez@atheros.com>]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Zhu Yi <yi.zhu@intel.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 10:43 -0600, Marcel Holtmann wrote:
>> I do wanna keep it as simple as possible, but on the other hand we
>> should do a pretty decent job with picking a regulatory domain when no
>> userspace is present (old or CRDA missing).
>>
>> So my current thinking is that the regulatory hint for a card is limited
>> to the frequencies the card actually registers with mac80211. If the
>> internal card is 2.4 GHz, then we limit the hint to this. So the 5 GHz
>> band is still a virgin. If a 5 GHz card comes along and it is the first
>> in its band, then we take its regulatory hint for that band, but for the
>> 2.4 GHz band it has to follow the first cards hint.
>>
>> As I mentioned before, first card wins is a perfect solution from my
>> point of view, but we should not punish a second card in a different
>> band if the first card is not touching this band at all. And I can see
>> these user scenarios happening and in some cases they might be done on
>> purpose to serve every band with a different piece of hardware.
>>
>> And for the cases where new bands might be used in the future. In that
>> case we do have to do this right since userspace might be outdated. Lets
>> face it, we should always support a new kernel with an old userspace.
>> That is how the Linux kernel is suppose to work. That is probably the
>> only reason why wireless extensions are still around ;)
>>
>> The idea of having a 2.4 GHz only card provide a hint for 5 GHz is just
>> plain wrong. If the hardware is designed for 2.4 GHz it should not mess
>> with other frequencies.
>>
>> So my solution would be first regulatory hint in each band wins.
>>
>> Also we should have printk that shows up in dmesg in cases where neither
>> crda or iw modified the regulatory domain and we have clash with the
>> hints provided by two or more cards.
>
> I totally agree with you. IIRC, the current situation is nobody is
> willing to implement the per-band regulatory hints for such a rare but
> valid case. Luis, will you accept patches if somebody else write it?

What are you talking about? I wrote a patch for you. I just do not
agree with the approach anymore, you are trying to resolve an issue by
not fixing the real source to the problem.

  Luis