Re: [RFC] make wext wireless bits optional and deprecate them

[Dan Williams <dcbw-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org>]

On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 17:39 +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 11:24 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 14:16 +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > > > Instead of testing for wireless/, best thing would probably be to call
> > > > SIOCGIWRANGE on the device and if it returns EOPNOTSUP then it's not
> > > > wireless.  Some drivers may have to load firmware to figure out
> > > > supported rates and encryption capabilities, but to be honest, NM does
> > > > this to detect wireless devices and I haven't run into any issues in 4
> > > > years using it.  If there are issues with drivers, then we need to fix
> > > > the driver too.
> > > 
> > > I was about to propose calling SIOCGIWNAME since that is what
> > > wireless-tools do and that linux/wireless.h indicates.
> > 
> > Hmm; NAME is pretty useless.  That's fine to do, I guess WEXT requires
> > that NAME return _something_ at least.  NAME should never ever be used
> > for anything more, but since wireless-tools appears to do this that's
> > fine.
> 
> Yes, I realise it is completely useless, but wext seems to require that
> it be implemented. RANGE would work as well but typically has much more
> complexity in the kernel.

Yup; NAME's better for this even though it's useless.

Dan

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