From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Johannes Berg Subject: Re: [PATCH] Marvell Libertas 8388 802.11b/g USB driver (v2) Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:01:24 +0000 Message-ID: <1169056884.9175.66.camel@johannes.berg> References: <20070116185524.GA5681@dmt> <20070117141103.0e468bf4@griffin.suse.cz> <1169046072.2750.10.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1169047134.9175.49.camel@johannes.berg> <1169055788.2550.44.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="=-o6LIjg/fqpGPwn2VP897" Cc: Jiri Benc , Marcelo Tosatti , netdev , Jeff Garzik , "John W. Linville" , "Luis R. Rodriguez" , Arnd Bergmann , Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo Return-path: Received: from crystal.sipsolutions.net ([195.210.38.204]:43581 "EHLO sipsolutions.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932564AbXAQSCF (ORCPT ); Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:02:05 -0500 To: Dan Williams In-Reply-To: <1169055788.2550.44.camel@localhost.localdomain> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org --=-o6LIjg/fqpGPwn2VP897 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 12:43 -0500, Dan Williams wrote: > I said "mostly" fullmac. Sort of like ipw2100 (IIRC) is softmac but it > does all the association stuff in firmware. It doesn't fit fullmac, but > it's a lot more fullmac than atheros. There isn't any management frame > processing, it doesn't do any data frame processing. Right. I hadn't looked at data frames but suspected this is the case. > The 8388 architecture is typical of a thick firmware architecture, where > the firmware handles all 802.11 MAC management tasks. The host driver > downloads standard 802.3 frames to the firmware to be transmitted over > the link as 802.11 frames. >=20 > I thought these 2 things were essentially _the_ definition of fullmac, > please correct me if I'm wrong. Well we'll need more terms here. I had a short chat with Jouni and we agree that what the Marvell card is doing is exposing the MLME interface, and what d80211 is doing is implementing most of the MLME. I guess the thing I'm saying is that exposing the MLME interface which changes fairly frequently is a bad thing and I'd love to have firmware that exposes lower level stuff like . > Perhaps I just don't understand how flexible d80211 has become; when we > last were talking about it 8 months ago, it appears that it could not > handle parts that did significant pieces of work in firmware, like the > 8388 does. Do we have the functionality in d80211 yet to handle pieces > that are a full mix of hybrid full/soft mac? No, we don't have that yet, and we might never have. But I think I'm starting to understand the issues at hand a bit better and it seems that we'll need cfg80211 to be redefined. > 1) What, if any of this, could actually fit into the d80211 stack, given > the mostly fullmac operations of this part?=20 Can we rephrase this in terms of the MLME interface etc that the 802.11 standard speaks about? That'd be easier I think. > 3) Could you enumerate your issues with the command dispatching? Right > now, many of the commands are blocking, which is suboptimal. This is an > artifact of the embedded history of the part. We need to eventually fix > that and make the upper layers not expect to block stuff like auth/assoc > and scanning. What other stuff are you thinking of? Well, one thing is that the whole command processing goes through a single function for no real benefit. You're basically saying command(...,CMD_NUM,...) and in command() you do switch(cmd_num) and multiplex it to a lot of functions again. I suppose I'd rather it called the functions directly and those in turn called the little common code there is in the dispatch routine. johannes --=-o6LIjg/fqpGPwn2VP897 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Johannes Berg (powerbook) iD8DBQBFrmR0/ETPhpq3jKURAgFNAKCYbgPtAYDjGp885gx1jUnps/JPNwCgr8f2 +D12yLhIsB1mbsnD+33CxzE= =5Thf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-o6LIjg/fqpGPwn2VP897--