Re: ar9170 in AP mode

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

Holger Schurig <holgerschurig@googlemail.com> writes:

>> How common is the combination of powersaving and mcast in practice?
>> Given that quite a few useful scenarios are blocked right now (unless
>> you know what to patch), I would at least vote for a config option or a
>> module parameter. That gives a chance to warn the user about this
>> limitation without locking out people that are no hackers.
>
> In my case (hand-help devices) it's very common. Without power-save,
> the battery would be drained so fast it wouldn't be usable.

Yes, just to give a concrete example of n810 wlan idle case
(associated, but no data transfered):

ps off  7 hours
ps on   7 days

Huge difference.

> And with power-save and an AP that can't handle this, you'd get
> weird errors.

Exactly. These kinds of errors are very difficult for the users to
understand.

> So, I personally prefer to have "Do an AP right" or "Don't do it at
> all". But please no general enablement.
>
> But, for example, having some CONFIG_AR9K_AP_MODE depending on
> CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL and a bit fat warning would do for me. Hopefully
> this would scara away distros, so that they don't turn this on for
> there standard kernel :-)

I think EXPERIMENTAL is not enough, I would prefer that the user needs
to patch the driver to enable it. Or if that's not good enough, then
maybe depend on BROKEN.

-- 
Kalle Valo