basic MLME question

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 11:57:42AM -0800, Chuck Tuffli wrote:
> I'm a newbie to wpa_supplicant and am trying to figure out when a device
> driver might choose to use the MLME support in the supplicant vs
> implementing association, authentication, etc itself?

At the moment, the choice should be quite easy: driver would use MLME
from wpa_supplicant only if it is a development driver for experimental
use. In other words, this is not yet ready for prime time.

Once the design and implementation gets more complete, the choice would
likely depend on whether the driver/802.11 network stack authors would
be interested in avoiding extra work and to be able to avoid number of
compilcations that are being added to the 802.11 standard with new
security extensions (mainly, 802.11r and 802.11w).

> Also, how are IE's and parameters not related to security (e.g. WMM)
> communicated back to the driver in MLME mode? Thanks!

At the moment, only a small set of parameters is passed back to the
driver. For example, WMM support is not available yet. Once a new
kernel-user space interface for wireless in Linux gets into more useful
state, this will likely start changing and this kind of features will be
added to the interface.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA