On Fri, 2021-08-13 at 09:08 -0700, Kees Cook wrote:

quoted

The common helper should also clear ack_signal, but that was broken by
commit e3e1a0bcb3f1 ("mac80211: reduce IEEE80211_TX_MAX_RATES"), because
that commit changed the order of the fields and updated carl9170 and p54
properly but not the common helper...

It looks like p54 actually uses the rates, which is why it does this
manually. I can't see why carl9170 does this manually, though.

mac80211 also uses the rates later again on status reporting, it just
expects the # of attempts to be filled etc. I haven't looked at
carl9170, but I would expect it to do something there and do it
correctly, even though old it's a well-written driver and uses mac80211
rate control, so this would need to be correct for decent performance.

But I guess it could be that the helper could be used because the rates
were already handed to the firmware, and the code was just copy/pasted
from p54 (the drivers were, IIRC, developed by the same folks)

johannes