[PATCH 1/2] supplicant: Use high-priority queue for management packets.

[Ben Greear]

On 01/31/2014 05:55 AM, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 09:18 -0800, Ben Greear wrote:
>
>>> Now, I'm not necessarily saying this would be a bad thing, but as it
>>> stands right now I'm not convinced that this can be done.
>>
>> I'm not trying to force a driver to do anything, but I would definitely
>> like to suggest a driver give the management packets high priority,
>> and for drivers I can use and modify, I will try to make sure they work
>> properly.  Other driver writers can do as they wish.
>
> Sure, that's all well, I guess I'm just a bit worried that other drivers
> might interpret those priority values of 256+ as different specials, and
> the wrong thing would happen if this change was done generically in
> wpa_s.

Well, how many drivers are there, anyway?  Maybe a simple grep would show
any conflicts.  I'll go poke around this when I get a chance.

>
>> If anyone can proclaim an API, then you can.  If you have another API in mind,
>> please detail it.  If no one cares, then I can just carry the hostap patch in
>> my own tree and move on to other things.
>
> The obvious other alternative would be to just do this in the kernel,
> assigning high priority to any packets that have
> tx->sdata->control_port_protocol == tx->skb->protocol (speaking in
> mac80211 language) - a number of drivers already do some special things
> via IEEE80211_TX_CTRL_PORT_CTRL_PROTO.
>
> I'm not entirely sure that's a better solution overall, but in terms of
> driver compatibility it would certainly be less risky.

In the past, there was a big push to move/keep 'policy' out of the kernel
and into user-space.  You would be doing the opposite.

Your suggestion, unless backported, would not fix older kernels
either.

But, I don't care that much either way, so whatever you decide is fine
with me.

Thanks,
Ben


-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com