Re: [RFC 3/6] wifi: mac80211: notify driver about per-radio monitor enabled state

[Felix Fietkau <nbd@nbd.name>]

> On 23. Aug 2024, at 12:16, Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 2024-08-05 at 21:23 +0200, Felix Fietkau wrote:
>> This allows monitoring on one or more radios while minimizing performance
>> impact on the others.
> 
> But why are you doing it this way? You could already solve this entirely
> with the driver by setting WANT_MONITOR_VIF and dealing with that, I'd
> think? At least after this series.
> 
> I generally don't like hw->conf, it just hasn't really matched reality
> for years with all kinds of new concurrency capabilities. At the very
> least you'd have to write more text here to convince me that we want to
> add something to it ... :)

I really don’t see how WANT_MONITOR_VIF helps. It seems completely unrelated to me, since it only creates a single driver visible vif, if there are no non-monitor vifs on the phy.
I want to be able to control, which radios I want to capture on, regardless of which vifs are already active on the same phy.
A global monitor enable/disable status means that I can’t prevent monitor-incompatible offloads from being disabled on radios that I’m not monitoring on.

- Felix