Custom driver specific commands

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 11:26:28AM -0800, Dmitry Shmidt wrote:

> I need to be able to call driver specific IOCTL (commands) from control
> application.

Would you be able to describe what kind of functionality this is used
for? Are these truly driver specific or could there be more generic use
for them?

> It is possible to call IOCTL directly, but I think it will be more
> "architecturally" correct to do this through supplicant interface.
> It was not a big deal to add additional command processing to ctrl_iface.c
> and additional entry to struct wpa_driver_ops, that will
> process command and pass it to the driver.
> 
> Does it seem Ok ? Am I missing something ?

I would assume this depends on what the exact functionality would be. I
could imagine some driver interaction to be perfectly reasonable to do
directly from an external application at least when the operations are
completely independent from the normal supplicant functionality (e.g.,
WMM configuration) while some operations are likely to fit better with
wpa_supplicant talking to the driver in order to avoid conflicts with
other wpa_supplicant-initiated commands.

As far as the source code change itself is concerned, yes, I would
expect that an additional command in ctrl_iface.c and a handler function
in struct wpa_driver_ops would be the cleanest way of doing this for
driver specific changes.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA