Re: [RFC PATCH v1 3/3] mac80211: add beacon filtering support

[Kalle Valo <kalle.valo@iki.fi>]

Jouni Malinen <j@w1.fi> writes:

> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 08:36:03PM +0200, Kalle Valo wrote:
>> I see your point, I also have had to suffer because of buggy APs
>> having unstable TBTT. But the cost for this is high, currently it
>> increases two seconds the time to signal a lost connection to the user
>> space. I would hope to have something faster.
>
> How can that take two seconds?

I was just referring to the current implementation.

> All that would be needed here is to send out a unicast Probe Request
> to the current AP and wait for a Probe Response for a short timeout,
> say 20 ms. That shouldn't take more than 50 ms or so at most.. 

I agree. Or sending a null frame and waiting for ack is even faster,
but I think mac80211 doesn't yet have infrastructure to check the
acks. And not all hardware can support this, unfortunately.

> If the current implementation uses two seconds for this, there is
> certainly room for improvement there and I would rather see that
> done than lose this extra protection against buggy implementations
> (either AP or STA for that matter).

Sure. But the thing is that there are a lot of buggy APs which are
broken is so many different ways that I would like to have a limit for
workarounds we create. But I guess this workaround might still be
useful. I'll revisit this whenever I find time to work on roaming
improvements, hopefully after few weeks.

-- 
Kalle Valo