Re: wireless userspace MLME and generic netlink vs. multicast (was: Re: [Take 2] mac80211 IEEE802.11e/WMM code cleanup)

On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 10:08 +0800, Zhu Yi wrote:

OK. This is the key of the discussion.

I agree.

Do we take wpa_supplicant the
only implementation of userspace MLME or even decision making (ie. DLS
config) daemon? 

I think it's a combination of these facts. I don't think DLS decision
making can properly live in wpa_supplicant, it'll need to be integrated
into various multimedia frameworks for example. What Michael is
basically proposing from what I can tell is that all these frameworks
rely on wpa_supplicant's socket-based configuration to tell
wpa_supplicant about it.

If so, we don't need the API. Otherwise we'd better have
the API in the kernel because we cannot expect both userspace MLME
implentation A and B support the same API (via IPC) for configuration.

Exactly. On the one hand I guess you could argue that if the MLME
implementation would be in the kernel there'd only be one as well, but
on the other hand I'd rather be able to have various different MLMEs.
Maybe the xsupplicant project is interested in doing some of this as
well, or maybe some of the various wireless testing tools would like to
be an MLME too under some circumstances...

johannes