[PATCH 00/13] no more mon.wlan0 (hostap patches)

[Johannes Berg]

On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 17:42 -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:14:39 +0200
> Johannes Berg <johannes at sipsolutions.net> wrote:
> 
> > This adds support for all the stuff I just
> > posted for the kernel and now hostapd can
> > run without the monitor interface.
> 
> That's very good news.  Using monitor mode for non-debugging
> functionality has always seemed inelegant to me.  Thank you for that
> effort!

:-)

> Code like this makes me think that your patches are breaking
> compatibility with older kernels:
> 
> +	if (nl80211_register_spurious_class3(bss))
> +		return -1;
> 
> Are you going to provide backward compatibility in hostapd?

It's actually there. If you look more closely, you'll see that all this
is only invoked if the device claims to have "station poll" support and
does not advertise AP SME in the device. Using the station poll command
is a bit of a hack but I intend to merge the kernel patches in the right
order so that makes sense for mac80211. Non-mac80211 drivers that need
AP SME in userspace will either have to support that (hopefully) or
we'll have to find some new way in the future. We could also check mgmt
frame subscription ability for instance.

In any case, I even tested this briefly with an unpatched kernel and
hostapd still worked. Didn't test multi-BSS cases but I expect those to
work in that case -- I'm more doubtful about those working in the new
case :-)

johannes