wpa_supplicant and power saving options

[Adrien Bustany]

Le 04/02/2012 20:12, Jouni Malinen a ?crit :
> On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 03:30:10PM +0200, Adrien Bustany wrote:
>> it seems that currently wpa_supplicant does not expose properties of
>> wlan drivers like "powersaving" or "tx power" via DBus. Is it
>> because that is outside the scope of wpa_supplicant, or just because
>> nobody needed that yet? If it's outside the scope of wpa_supplicant,
>> I guess there could be a "power saving daemon" (or whatever you might
>> call it) sitting next to wpa_supplicant that would also interact with
>> the device using netlink, I suppose there would be no problems with
>> having many programs sending netlink messages to the same device?
>
> For most parts, this sounds like something that would be outside the
> scope of wpa_supplicant. What kind of use would you have for these?
>

Adjusting the TX power of the chip can be used to save quite some power 
(of course, if you reduce it too much then things stop working :) ), 
powersaving is a flag exposed by nl80211, I guess what drivers actually 
do is implementation specific. Those two are quite relevant on mobile 
devices, where you want to reduce power usage as much as possible.
I guess that as long as the netlink messages sent by a "power" daemon 
are not the same as the one sent by wpa-supplicant, conflicts will be 
minimal?

Cheers

Adrien