Dynamic VLAN operation

[Matt Brown]

Hi Jouni,

I'm trying to extend madwifi to support the dynamic VLAN functionality
that you've just added from the devicescape stack, and I have some
questions that I'm hoping you can answer for me!

What I'm wanting to do is have each client that is associated with the
access point presented to userspace on an individual VLAN. I don't want
the clients themselves to have to deal with 802.1q packets, the wireless
driver should take care of any necessary "tagging", or "untagging".

Is this the right sort of problem to be trying to solve with the dynamic
vlan functionality, or have I misunderstood it's intended use?

I have a patch for madwifi that already implements this per-node-vlan
functionality, but it's not integrated with hostapd, and I'm having
trouble working out exactly what I need to do. Unfortunately I've never
used the devicescape stack before, so I'm shooting in the dark a little!

Can you provide some guidance on what the driver needs to do to support
dynamic VLANs?

>From what I can see so far I need to provide:

* An ioctl that hostapd can call to tell the driver which VLAN a
particular sta should be placed in.

* add_if, del_if and update_if ioctl that hostapd uses to request the
driver to create a vlan interface.

What I'm unsure about is why the add_if, del_if and update_if ioctls are
needed. Why can't hostapd just create the vlan interface in userspace
(it has the code to do it in vlan_add...)? Why does this have to be done
by the driver?

I also don't understand how the devicescape stack deals with placing
clients into the vlans. If you could point me to the appropriate places
in the stack to look at it would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

Cheers

-- 
Matt Brown
matt at mattb.net.nz
Mob +64 21 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz

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