openvswitch and hostap?

[James Harper]

> 
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 2:28 AM, James Harper <james at ejbdigital.com.au>
> wrote:
> > I just threw this patch together. It runs the 'ovs-vsctl port-to-br' command
> to determine the name of the bridge, falling back to the old bridge detection
> method if that fails.
> >
> > It could be further developed to also add and remove the interface etc, but
> that's not really the way openvswitch works - interfaces are sticky wrt bridge
> membership and you don't need to re-add them each boot etc.
> >
> > Another option would be to add a config parameter that says "don't do any
> bridge configuration".
> 
> Main problem is that if the wlanX interface is bridged hostapd needs
> access for grabbing EAPOL frames off from the bridge device.
> So it needs to know the bridge interface.
> 
> I'm using this one but did not consider sending it upstream as it is
> quite a hack:
> https://github.com/hschaa/hostapd/commit/c89daaeca4ee90c8bc158e37acb
> 1b679c823d7ab
> 

I think all you really need to do is the detection (the iface-to-br like both yours and my patch does). Adding and removing ports from a bridge is kind of out of place in a program like hostapd, especially with ovs as it remembers port membership anyway. I can kind of see why you might want it with the legacy bridge code, but I still wouldn't do it that way.

It?s a shame ovs doesn't provide the same /sys namespace as bridge... if it did we wouldn't even be having this discussion :(

James