From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from out3-smtp.messagingengine.com ([66.111.4.27]:38753 "EHLO out3-smtp.messagingengine.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751513AbaGPUYo (ORCPT ); Wed, 16 Jul 2014 16:24:44 -0400 Received: from compute3.internal (compute3.nyi.mail.srv.osa [10.202.2.43]) by gateway1.nyi.mail.srv.osa (Postfix) with ESMTP id CCF0621F10 for ; Wed, 16 Jul 2014 16:24:42 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <53C6DF7C.8030109@fastmail.fm> (sfid-20140716_222449_125941_82DB7276) Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 21:24:28 +0100 From: Michalis Pappas MIME-Version: 1.0 To: devel@driverdev.osuosl.org, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org CC: inaky@linux.intel.com, Ben Chan Subject: How to replace control code in gdm72xx? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi, I'm currently working on bringing the gdm72xx WiMAX driver out of staging. The driver currently uses two control channels: 1. The SIOCDEVPRIVATE ioctl to send and receive state messages 2. A customly defined netlink protocol for passing messages verbatim to the device controller AFAIK both of the above are deprecated, so I considered switching to the interface defined in wimax.h, which defines a communication protocol over generic netlink that replaces (2) nicely. However it is not compatible with (1), as: * Except from the device status, the gdm72xx driver uses two more types of messages (connection and OMA status), which is not supported by wimax.h. * The gdm driver needs to be able to receive status messages from userspace, which is not supported by wimax.h either. I therefore consider using the wimax stack as defined in wimax.h for the netlink part, but replacing the ioctl with a file under /sys/class/net/wm0/ My questions are whether the above location would be the right place for that file, and, more importantly, whether this is a generally a valid approach and not just an ugly workaround. Thanks, Michalis