IFF_RUNNING and SIOCGMIIPHY support

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 01:01:57PM +0000, David Goodenough wrote:

> Mii-tool does no appear to be supported by hostap, and I was wondering
> why.  Obviously the mode makes a difference, so saying that a node in 
> master mode is connected makes little sense, but for a managed or
> ad-hoc mode node the link speed and the presence or absence of an 
> active connection would be useful.

Isn't mii-tool quite Ethernet-specific? What would be the purpose of
using it with a wireless driver? I did not notice SIOCGMIIPHY support in
any of the kernel tree driver for wireless devices.

> Quagga seems to say that it needs IFF_RUNNING supported by an
> interface, and I guess is doing the same thing looking to see if there
> is an active connection.  Looking in the source code I could not see
> any occurences of this flag, but I suppose it might have a different
> form which I missed.

IFF_RUNNING was always set when the interface was up. Anyway, I have
been thinking of adding netif_carrier_{on,off}() calls to the driver
based on the association state and ended up doing it now. The
development snapshot from the CVS has now code for setting the carrier
off when in station mode and not associated. This clears the IFF_RUNNING
flag for user space programs and generates a linkwatch event in the
kernel.

I verified that ifconfig was showing RUNNING flag only when the card was
associated, but I did not do more testing. Does this work with Quagga?

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA