wpa_cli ping-pong and power management

[Alon Bar-Lev]

On Saturday 27 December 2008, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
> 
> 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.
> > 
> 
> 
> 


---

diff -urNp wpa_supplicant-0.6.4.org/wpa_supplicant/wpa_cli.c wpa_supplicant-0.6.4/wpa_supplicant/wpa_cli.c
--- wpa_supplicant-0.6.4.org/wpa_supplicant/wpa_cli.c	2008-08-10 20:33:12.000000000 +0300
+++ wpa_supplicant-0.6.4/wpa_supplicant/wpa_cli.c	2009-01-03 14:11:19.000000000 +0200
@@ -1363,7 +1363,7 @@ static void wpa_cli_interactive(void)
 	do {
 		wpa_cli_recv_pending(ctrl_conn, 0, 0);
 #ifndef CONFIG_NATIVE_WINDOWS
-		alarm(1);
+		alarm(60);
 #endif /* CONFIG_NATIVE_WINDOWS */
 #ifdef CONFIG_READLINE
 		cmd = readline("> ");
@@ -1471,7 +1471,7 @@ static void wpa_cli_action(struct wpa_ct
 	while (!wpa_cli_quit) {
 		FD_ZERO(&rfds);
 		FD_SET(fd, &rfds);
-		tv.tv_sec = 2;
+		tv.tv_sec = 60;
 		tv.tv_usec = 0;
 		res = select(fd + 1, &rfds, NULL, NULL, &tv);
 		if (res < 0 && errno != EINTR) {
@@ -1525,7 +1525,7 @@ static void wpa_cli_alarm(int sig)
 		wpa_cli_reconnect();
 	if (ctrl_conn)
 		wpa_cli_recv_pending(ctrl_conn, 1, 0);
-	alarm(1);
+	alarm(60);
 }
 #endif /* CONFIG_NATIVE_WINDOWS */