From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: James Ketrenos Subject: wireless management... kernel or user space? Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:47:47 -0500 Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <40D20373.3020406@linux.jf.intel.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: To: netdev@oss.sgi.com Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org With the various discussions going on about a generic 802.11 frame/management stack, and the recent thread on wireless extensions, I wanted to find out what people's thoughts are on where wireless management should occur -- kernel or user space... Within the hostap project there exists the ability to have some AP management occur internal to the driver or (via the PRISM2_NO_KERNEL_IEEE80211_MGMT define) in a user space daemon. Does anyone have any thoughts on how much logic should be placed into the generic 802.11 frame/management/control handling stack vs. pushing to a user space component? If (for example) AP associate request / response policy is pushed to a user space component, by what mechanism does it make sense for the driver/application to send/receive the 802.11 frames? Are people happy with the way Host AP currently does it, or is there a better way? Other types of policy that could occur in user space would be for scan requests, probe response collection, AP selection to associate, etc. What is the general direction the wireless networking stack should take? Minimize kernel side wherever possible? With ipw2100 (and I believe other cards) the hw/fw handles a lot of the above internally, so the mechanism by which the user space application communicates with the driver would need allow for hw/fw capabilities to be exposed so the user doesn't get a broken experience. Thoughts? James (of ipw2100.sf.net)