wpa_cli ping-pong and power management

[Alon Bar-Lev]

Hello,

Have you considered raising the alarm() interval of wpa_cli so that
laptops will consume less power?

The alarm() watchdog is only required when wpa_supplicant abnormally
terminates, as when it normally terminates it sends correct message.

The 1 second wakeup takes a lot of power if you look at powertop results.

Converting the dgram protocol into stream is rather difficult at this point, so
setting the alarm() timeout to 20 secs or even 60 secs will provide some
remedy.

Regards,
Alon Bar-Lev.

On Saturday 01 November 2008, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
> On 11/1/08, Jouni Malinen <j at w1.fi> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 09:31:16AM +0200, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
> >
> >  > I now can locate the select you mentioned.
> >  > I tried to modify the code to recognize the disconnect and found that
> >  > the control socket is dgram... So thee is no way  to know that the
> >  > peer is down except trying to ping-pong.
> >  > Will you accept an option to make the control socket stream?
> >
> >
> > Changing this is a bit difficult now due to deployed systems and client
> >  applications depending on the current mechanism. Anyway, I would
> >  probably be fine with a build time option to select a stream socket
> 
> OK.
> So will you at least for the time being modify the 2 sec interval to
> something higher, something like 20 sec or so?
> 
> It will take some time to convert this to stream, as each packet
> should also contain the length of the command, and the current
> blocking processing of the control socket is not very suitable for
> completing the command.
> 
> Alon.
>