wpa_supplicant and automatic roaming.

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 09:59:04AM +0100, Ed W wrote:
> I for one would be interested in more info on bg_learn?  From the source 
> and the odd commit it seems to simply be smarter at scanning, but all 
> the hints like the one above suggest to use simple?  Is "learn" 
> considered production ready?

bgscan_simple is used quite a bit more than bgscan_learn. In addition,
there have been number of changes in bgscan_simple that has not yet been
merged into bgscan_learn. I haven't worked with bgscan_learn in a while
and cannot really claim it to be complete at this point. I think it has
quite a bit more potential for improvements than bgscan_simple, but it
is still in need of further work and testing to make it as robust.

> Also it's been raised in the past, but for many situations it seems to 
> make more sense to have a scan parameter at the top level, eg typical 
> roaming user may not need/wish to enter roaming details per network, but 
> instead just wants the network to rescan if it drops out and it seems 
> extremely obvious to desire a regular scan when *no* network is 
> detected?  There were some patches in particular for the last point some 
> time back, but it's not clear if they went anywhere?
> 
> What chance of a feature request for a top level "scan every 5 minutes 
> when connected and every 5 seconds when no network connected" feature?

I'm not sure why this would need any new mechanism to control the
scanning while connected part other than using existing bgscan
mechanism. I would be fine with providing default bgscan parameter as a
global configuration parameter that would then apply to any network
block that does not override the bgscan value (and also not for P2P
groups since those are known to not have more than a single BSS). This
type of global configuration is becoming even more important with
Hotspot 2.0 that uses dynamic networks that cannot really currently be
configured properly for bgscan.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA