| [...] | AFAIK, hostap mode is crappy with most drivers, since they doesn't vary | the sending strength (AKA 'power saving') and the clients expect this. | [...]
Actually, power saving at the AP has nothing to do with "sending strength". It is about buffering frames in the AP for clients that are sleeping. And yes, OpenBSD does not currently do that, so clients that are sleeping will never wake up (actually they will wake up at regular interval but will immediately return to sleep) because the AP does not inform them that they have buffered frames. This is something that is being worked on but that is not easy to implement properly. USB devices are usually a bad choice for building an AP anyway, since they have some restrictions (usually, they do not give per-frame feedback about TX retries, making it difficult to do per-client rate control, or they don't provide a way to update beacons content atomically, making it difficult to support anything but 802.11b or plain 802.11a for instance). Some drivers (ural(4), rum(4), maybe others as well) provide some very limited AP support that can be handy sometimes but you can't rely on this for everyday use. The situation is a little bit better for PCI/CardBus devices, but we don't support AP mode power-saving for them either. Damien
