On Wednesday 20 December 2006 20:12, Matthew Garrett wrote:

Veering off at something of a tangent - how much of this should be true
for wireless devices? Softmac seems to be unhappy about setting the
essid unless the card is up, which breaks various assumptions...

Softmac isn't the only wireless code that likes to be configured after going 
up first. Configuring after the card goes up has generally been more 
reliable, though that should not be necessary and is a bug IMHO. 

Beyond that, I think your descriptions of up and down states make sense
for userspace. As Arjan suggests, there's then the intermediate state of
"disable as much as possible while still providing scanning and link
detection".

In order to scan, we need to have the radio on and we need to be able to send 
and receive. What are you gonna turn off?

-Michael Wu