[PATCH] wext: handle mode switches correctly for mac80211

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 09:30:56PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> Since mac80211 requires that the device be !IFF_UP to change the mode
> (and I think the old prism54 fullmac driver does too), do that.  This
> shouldn't harm fullmac devices since they can handle mode switches on
> the fly and usually don't care about up/down that much.

I've received lots of questions and disagreement on setting interface
down/up since hostapd does it currently when used with madwifi. The main
complaint is that this drops IP layer configuration.. Another one is
that this affects some external programs (e.g., Wireshark stops
capturing frames which is quite inconvenient when debugging connection
issues). As long as such issues are present, I would prefer to limit
this to as few cases as possible and as such, I think it would be better
to first try to change the mode without setting the interface down since
there are drivers that can handle that and only if that fails and the
mode is changing, try to set the interface down.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA