From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Johannes Berg Subject: Re: wlan#ap seems bogus Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:22:54 +0200 Message-ID: <44E1764E.8010200@sipsolutions.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org, Jouni Malinen , Jiri Benc Return-path: Received: from crystal.sipsolutions.net ([195.210.38.204]:34251 "EHLO sipsolutions.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S965270AbWHOHW6 (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Aug 2006 03:22:58 -0400 To: Simon Barber In-Reply-To: Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Simon Barber wrote: > The purpose of the wlap0ap or wlap0mgmt interface is to communicate > between hostapd/wpa_supplicant and the kernel. What travels over this > interface is not quite pure 802.11 management frames - there is some > meta-data with each frame, and a few special case messages. E.G. > transmitted frames are returned back to user space to indicate > successful transmission (required so that the MLME state machine can be > correctly implemented in user space). I believe these messages form a > special management protocol between the kernel and user space, and that > netlink would be the best solution for this link. Switching to netlink > would allow these bogus 'network' interfaces to be removed alltogether. > Unfortunately I don't currently have the time to put together a patch to > do this. > Ok, I'll try to remember that this is waiting on defining a complete new netlink API. I was just reading the code and this seemed odd, but I agree that no network interface is really needed and hence it can stay like this until we switch to a new API unifying it. Thanks, johannes