Re: [PATCH] Marvell Libertas 8388 802.11b/g USB driver (v2)

On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 10:01 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:

The part is a mostly fullmac part that until now has been targetted at
the embedded market (PSP, N80 phone, etc).  That means that the driver
shouldn't be too large (airo is about 8000 kLOC without airo_cs) but for
some reason it still is; we're working on that.

I disagree that this is a fullmac part. You need to tell it to
authenticate and then you need to tell it to associate. IPW is a
fullmac, you tell it "use SSID xxx". Not this, you tell it "auth to
BSSID aaa" and then "associate to BSSID aaa" etc.

Besides the fact that I think this is a very dumb thing to do in new
hardware due to IEEE 802.11w (protected management frames) being well
underway which you can't handle at all that way, I also don't see how
you can claim that this is fullmac when you need to tell it every step
of the way.

The way I see it, you're telling the firmware to send an auth frame and
then you wait for the firmware to come back and tell you "yes I have
received a response" instead of just sending the frame yourself and then
waiting for the response frame. So the difference is that you need to do
a bit less frame parsing in the driver-stack.

I could drown you in technical comments on everything starting from the
way commands are sent, via the fact that there are large chunks of dead
code (#ifdef REASSOCIATION), down to the formatting of comments and
other trivialities, but I'd rather address the larger issues first.

johannes