[PATCH] Add extended 'driver' command

[Dmitry Shmidt]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 11:08 PM, Jouni Malinen <j at w1.fi> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 04:58:35PM -0700, Dmitry Shmidt wrote:
>> This patch will allow to add extended driver commands (through linked
>> external library) that can be
>> specific per wlan driver.
>
> This looks like a very bad idea. Why would this be needed? One of the
> main goals of wpa_supplicant is to provide a unified layer that allows
> upper layer software to not need to care about differences between
> drivers.
>
> Whatever this type of driver-specific command is used for needs to be
> done by introducing proper driver_ops callback functions for identified
> commands instead of an arbitrary mechanism for passing commands that
> requires other applications to know what exactly the driver happens to
> support.
>
> --
> Jouni Malinen ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?PGP id EFC895FA
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I totally agree with your approach, however it has two disadvantages:
1) We are adding needed commands in proper way slightly slower than
their demand appears.
For example, important command to get RSSI and other association
statuses was added several days ago, and
still without external API.
2) Some commands implementation is vendor-specific, using sysfs or special IOCTL

So my point is let's add something similar to old private command
approach in WEXT and it will give to people flexibility
to extend functionality that is still not mainstreamed. And then let's
try to move all new commands to proper API as you
suggested.

Thanks,
Dmitry