I was having this discussion with a couple of folks from the
To list, and it may be useful to have it with a wider audience.
Please feel free to forward/include others that I have
unintentionally missed. Internal mailing lists have been bcc-ed.
--Sowmini
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We are getting more ethernet drivers to
provide setprop/getprop calllback for Brussels, and in
doing so, we are adding many new features for these.
For example, PSARC 2008/222 adds Persistent restoration
of wifi props, so that the driver has the option of acquiring
a previously set property when it auto-configures/starts
itself. However, even though the wifi drivers are GLDv3 drivers,
they are not able to leverage from these features
because they don't provide setprop/getprop interfaces.
Instead, to set or get wifi properties, we do
wifi_cfg_getset, pcwl_getset, ipw_2100_getset, ipw_2200_getset etc.
In the interest of uniformity, and also so that
they can automatically inherit all the dladm features,
it would be better if we achieve the following:
- have the wifi drivers provide Brussels callback points
- make wifi drivers use Brussels-persistence interfaces to recover
properties
- modify libdladm so that it has the capability to invoke the
setprop/getprop callbacks of wifi drivers.
- if they wish to support wificonfig, the wifi drivers can
additionally provide support the WLAN* ioctls.
The advantage of this proposal is that wifi drivers will now be
able to use all of the Brussels features
Concerns:
1. wificonfig will not work with the setprop/getprop ioctls
2. there are opensolaris drivers that use the old ioctl interface
to be considered.
Regarding #1: should wificonfig be supported in Nevada? Can it be
EOL'ed.
One solution that would address both concerns is to have dladm
first try the {set,get}prop for the wifi driver, and if that fails,
to then try the WLAN_* ioctl.
