Hi Kalle,

From: Kalle Valo [mailto:kvalo@codeaurora.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2016 8:23 PM
To: Amitkumar Karwar
Cc: linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mwifiex: handle edmac vendor command

Amitkumar Karwar [off-list ref] writes:

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From: Kalle Valo [mailto:kvalo@codeaurora.org]
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2016 1:53 AM
To: Amitkumar Karwar
Cc: linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mwifiex: handle edmac vendor command

Amitkumar Karwar [off-list ref] writes:

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Hi Kalle,

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From: Amitkumar Karwar [mailto:akarwar@marvell.com]
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2016 9:28 PM
To: linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Jeff CF Chen; Amitkumar Karwar
Subject: [PATCH] mwifiex: handle edmac vendor command

From: chunfan chen <redacted>

Userspace can configure edmac values through a custom vendor

command.

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They will be used by hardware for adaptivity.

Signed-off-by: chunfan chen <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Amitkumar Karwar <redacted>

[deleted over 200 lines of unnecessary quotes]

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This patch seems to have deferred. We basically want a way to
download a vendor specific configuration to our firmware. Do you
have any suggestions on how can achieve this in better way?

I can see below iw command suits our requirement.

iw dev <devname> vendor send <oui> <subcmd> <filename|-|hex data>

Please guide.

It was deferred because use of the nl80211 vendor interface (which I
don't think belong to upstream drivers). I'll take a look at this
patch in detail after the merge window.

Did you get a chance to check this patch?
Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Sorry for the delay. I have been thinking about vendor commands quite a
lot and I don't think they belong to upstream drivers. For regular use
cases (used by normal users) we have nl80211, for developer and testing
purposes we have debugfs and for manufacturing type of tests we have
nl80211 testmode interface. The focus of development should be adding
new functionality to nl80211 (and other generic interfaces), not to
driver specific vendor commands.

I know brcm80211 and ti's wlcore have few vendor commands but I'm hoping
to remove them sometime soon.

Thoughts?

Thanks for your reply.

There is something called energy detect mode. Chip can detect non-WiFi radio signal also and monitor it for specified time before transmitting frames.
As per ETSI specification, enabling this mode is mandatory for some countries for certain frequencies.

The purpose of this patch is to configure the chip for working in this mode.
I can see cfg80211 has a framework to handle vendor specific commands and events. I think having vendor commands would be helpful to support vendor specific functionalities which can't be generalized.

I suppose debugfs interface is only for collecting stats and info which can be used for debugging purpose.

Regards,
Amitkumar