>> So I would propose to put the whole struct into the netlink messages, > This is a terrible idea, since internal changes to this struct would > break the userland API/ABI. hwsim seems perhaps less important than > most APIs, but there is wmediumd etc. already. I agree with that, but there exist also other code in hwsim, which is tightly coupled with the mac80211 API, as e.g., the usage of IEEE80211_TX_MAX_RATES, which already broke older versions of wmediumd or similar implementations. Maybe a review regarding such things would be good to decouple the userspace daemon from the special kernel version.
>> but I think that will break up the communication to e.g. bob >> copelands >> wmediumd and similar simulations. I would like to have our >> Implementation working with mainline kernels and therefore ask how we >> could achieve this easily. >> >> Obviously, we could define another field in the hwsim messages, but >> as bob copeland already stated, significantly more information within >> the netlink messages could intensify the timing overhead of hwsim. > I don't think we have any other choice but add the relevant fields as > proper attributes. I'm totally fine with that. Nonetheless, I would suggest to add the flags to "struct hwsim_tx_rate", since the flags are also tightly coupled to the rates and tries of a frame. To not break up things, we could add the flags as a separate attribute in the struct and not as part of the bitfield like in the original. This would be possible, due to the "__packed" flag, but I'm also unsure, whether this is a really good idea for a userspace API/ABI. Benjamin
