[PATCH 01/13] wifi: cfg80211: Add provision to advertise multiple radio in one wiphy
Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan
quic_vthiagar at quicinc.com
Sun Apr 14 09:02:33 PDT 2024
On 4/13/2024 9:10 PM, Ben Greear wrote:
> On 4/12/24 08:58, Ben Greear wrote:
>> On 4/12/24 07:31, Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan wrote:
>
>>> As said, please feel free to propose an alternate solution to address the issue.
>>
>> I do not know the particulars of your driver or driver's needs, but at high level:
>>
>> * Leave existing wiphy mapping as is.
>> * Allow adding new combined wiphy(s) on top of groups of underlying physical wiphys.
>> Sort of
>> like bridges on top of Eth ports.
>> * The combined wiphy would report underlying wiphy's capabilities (for instance, a
>> combined wiphy on top of
>> 3 single band phys would report itself as tri-band).
>> * The combined wiphy would add new netlink field listing of its underlying wiphys.
>> User-space wanting to control the combined
>> wiphy would generally configure the underlying phys (to set 2.4g channel to 6, you'd
>> set the underlying 2.4g
>> wiphy to channel 6)
>> * This should require very minimal changes to user space, except of course for new code
>> to actually utilize
>> the new combined wiphy.
>> * MLO links and any other logic that needs the combined view would live on the combined
>> wiphy (I understand
>> from Johannes' comments this is a needed feature.)
>> * Or user can ignore that combined wiphy entirely and directly use underlying wiphys
>> like we use them currently
>> for sniffers, stations, aps, combinations thereof.
>> * Advanced use case could allow combined wiphy to use subset of underlying radios (add
>> combined wiphy on 2.4 and 5g, use 6g for
>> dedicated mesh backhaul/whatever).
>> * Interesting logic would be needed to deal with constraints to properly share the
>> underlying resources (you could not
>> add 16 ap bssid to 2.4 wiphy and also add 16 other ones to the combined wiphy that
>> also uses 2.4 radio most likely,
>> for instance). But I think that logic has to be written
>> either way and is not overly worse with this approach.
>
> I had some further thoughts on this approach:
>
> * If someone has 2 QCA radio cards, and each radio card has 3 phys, would it be possible
> to have a 6-link MLO
> setup?
>
As long as supported frequencies of the radios are not overlapping , it is technically
possible to register 6 radios under one wiphy
> * Could two be200 be combined into a multi-channel concurrent MLO setup with this approach?
>
By nature, MLO device is multi-channel concurrent. Not quite sure about the
be200 capability.
>
> * For multi-phy arrangements like QCA ath12k and MTK7996, I think the default
> configuration when the driver
> loads should just be the physical phys by themselves (as mt7996, at least, does it
> now). This would be fully backwards compatible with
> current user-space and operation.
There can be configuration knobs in the driver to register it differently...
But the phys would have netlink attributes that
> lets user-space
> know combined phys (cphys?) can be created on top of them. User-space that knows
> about MLO can then
> create the cphy(s) as wanted and build sta/vap/whatever on top of the cphys.
>
Not quite positive on the combined_phy+legacy_phy design as mentioned in the previous mail.
> * For radios like be200 that are already designed to show a single phy to userspace, they
> would not
> need any significant change.
As mentioned, it is not lot of changes in hostapd/wpa_s. We'll post them once kernel
part is concluded.
Vasanth
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