[PATCH 07/15] supplicant: Allow user-defined defaults for Interworking network blocks.

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 03:49:25PM -0800, Ben Greear wrote:
> I use many virtual interfaces per supplicant, and all of those settings (disable ht, etc) are
> already implemented on a per-network-block case.  I just wanted to re-use that logic for
> interworking so that I could easily fake a 2x2 MIMO interworking client (or /a or whatever) when
> I have an /a/b/g/n 3x3 NIC acting as stations...

Could you please clarify why this is needed for Interworking cases? The
connection part there is identical to normal network connection and
should be easily testable by first creating the Interworking network and
then adding the test parameters to that block and asking reassociation.

If you want to make it really fake 2x2 on a 3x3 device, you'd need to do
changes in the driver to prevent the third chain from being enabled in
the first place. The parameters in wpa_supplicant are only for a
connected state and do not affect how the device is able to receive
three stream rates (or some other capabilities you may be trying to
disable) in general.

> If I put this in a global parameter block, then I'd have to basically re-implement
> all of the old ways of implementing these options?

Likely, but I'm unlikely to accept a hostap.git change to add all the
existing parameters in that way either unless I can first understand the
use case for this.

If desired, I would be fine with adding a new "INTERWORKING_ADD_NETWORK
<BSSID>" command that would behave otherwise like INTERWORKING_CONNECT,
but would stop just before calling interworking_reconnect() and instead,
would return the network id for the created network profile. This would
allow you to fill in the extra parameters you need using the existing
override parameters and then issue "SELECT_NETWORK <id>" (or
"REASSOCIATE" if other networks should be left enabled) to get
connected. This would avoid the extra connection that would show up in
the mechanism I described above (INTERWORKING_CONNECT, SET,
REASSOCIATE).

In fact, there may be other uses for this new command, so I'll probably
add it regardless of whether you are planning on using it.
 
-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA