Rebel fleet of wireless developers, Here's some changes which I think our current wireless stacks could use to assist cleaning up WEs, private ioctls, and provide userspace a cleaner framework to interact with our wireless drivers.
Kernel level: (1) Use the new *configfs* for all user-specific attributes (2) Use *sysfs* read-only kobjects for device-specific attributes like values which can be saved for suspend() and collected for resume(). IEEE 802.11 capabilities, features (for example radiotap), and what is currently settable/gettable from private ioctl realm along with its restrictions can also be exported via sysfs. (3) On resume() talk to userspace via netlink to read our sysfs and configfs us Userspace applications can then: (1) Interact with configfs for configuring wireless devices, including what used to be set by private ioctls (2) Retrieve attributes saved from sysfs and set them onto configfs after resume(). Sysfs will also tell us this card's capabilities, features and private data along with their respective restrictions we can work with so -- userspace can modify the available options which can be gettable/settable. (3) Respond to netlink communication from driver after resume() to set data through configfs --- I know we recently moved WE to netlink but I figured celebrating the happy marriage of Mr. sysfs and Mrs. configfs on 2.6.16 by giving them offspring would be nice and more appropriate. Here's an example run-through of how this would work: (1) A wireless device comes up and spits out device-specific default settings on sysfs (2) If a user wants to change essid, channel, power-save-mode (this is not suspend()), rate, and so forth userspace writes the settings into configfs, these would in turn get updated on sysfs by the driver. (3) Should the device go into suspend() the driver can then update its necessary attributes on sysfs required to recover from suspend() which may not have been updated yet (whatever they may be) (4) At resume() we could just have our driver read our sysfs attributes and try to set all of them back exactly how they were before but to reduce bloat on our drivers and since our state is already exported we could just have userspace do it for us so... we use netlink to communicate to userspace to go ahead and ask it to resume() us. Advantages of this would be userspace would always consistantly handle the assoc/desassoc and WPA in a consistent manner and as mentioned above, driver bloatness killing. (5) At resume() userspace reads sysfs and sets us back up through configfs Comments are appreciated, if this is something that seems desirable I can start cranking up some code. Luis - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
