Re: ieee80211_set_encryption...

["Jouni Malinen" <jkm@devicescape.com>]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 10:16:53AM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> ... is a big mess.

Yes, and so is the number of different ways this has been implemented in
hardware designs..

> What's with all the comments saying 'maybe with blabla hardware that can 
> be done in hw but disable here now' etc? Can't we just have a 'please 
> decide' callback in the driver that tells us whether this can be done in 
> hw or sw?

For some cases yes, but it is a bit difficult to come up with a generic
model that would work for everything. Supporting multiple BSSes in AP
mode makes some quite complex cases.

> Or how about no_tkip_wmm_hwaccel? That seems pretty weird too.

That's needed to allow TKIP hwaccel to be used for non-WMM case while
falling back to software for WMM. This is needed to workaround some
hardware issues. Sure, this could be hidden in the hardware driver, but
I would prefer to allow the 802.11 stack support software
encryption/decryption to keep the low-level drivers simpler (and to
avoid their authors from doing some silly copy-paste things with
encryption).

> I do realize that key management in the face of wpa2 and similar is 
> difficult, but this seems overly complex. Comments?

WPA2 is not the complex part; adding WMM into the picture with some
hardware design was and multi-BSS support adds quite a bit more
complexity here.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA