Killing wpa_supplicant and wi-fi interface down problem

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 09:16 +0530, Raghavendra wrote:
> Hi Dan,
> 
>    I totally agree with your point that it is better to put interface down, 
> when we kill wpa_supplicant. I my case I am using wpa_supplicant for 
> associating with the AP. I can not use this for scanning becoz of limitation 
> on the number of scan result it provides using control interface which is 
> max of 15 or 16 AP info. Also I we want to set advnced configuration of 

Well, if you were going to patch the supplicant to not bring the wifi
down when it exits, it would be better to just fix the scan result
limitation in the supplicant.  The supplicant gets the scan results
directly from the driver, so if the driver (or Wireless Extensions) is
the bottleneck, then you won't be able to do any better by scanning
yourself.

> interface like setting power management, RTS, txpower, getting MAC of 
> interface...etc we need wi-fi interface up and wpa_supplicant does not 
> provide support for these feature.

It doesn't, but all of these may be set whether the supplicant is
running or not.  The supplicant simply won't care about txpower, PM,
RTS, etc.  Just set them in response to association or disassociation
events that the supplicant emits, or do it before the supplicant is
spawned, or before you've sent the "enable_network" command to the
supplicant.

Dan