[PATCH] hostapd: allow disabling background radar

[Ben Greear]

On 4/16/22 7:36 AM, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 16, 2022 at 07:18:08AM -0700, Ben Greear wrote:
>> The mt7915 driver mistakenly enables this feature for mt7915 radios from
>> asia-rf that do not have the hardware support for this feature.
> 
> Has that been fixed in the driver already or is this a known, but not
> fixed issue in an actually released kernel version?

It is known to the developers and the mailing list, I told both.
But there is no fix proposed yet that I have seen.  I know how
to make my system work by both the hostapd change and by removing
the offending patch from the kernel.  That doesn't help other
users though.

> 
>> And there is very little complexity added by my patch.  There are often
>> unforseen bugs in new features, I think it is good practice to allow
>> them to be disabled.
> 
> Every new configuration parameter makes things more complex. I don't
> know how a normal user could easily figure out when to disable this
> particular feature as an example. I don't think I would agree with it
> being a good practice to provide an explicit user configuration
> parameter for all new features. In fact, I'd highly prefer not to have
> to do that for any new feature without a good justification. Whether
> this particular case is a good justification depends on whether that
> identified driver issue has made its way into commonly used kernel
> releases. The most appropriate fix for this would obviously be to fix
> the driver instead of providing user space workarounds that users would
> need to manually figure out when to use.

So far, there is one driver that supports this feature, and it is broken.
Makes me think it won't be the last.

In the case bugs are found in features like this, it is a whole lot easier
to tell the user to enable some obscure feature in their hostapd conf file
vs have them patch and compile hostapd and/or the kernel.  That is why I
like enable/disable options for this sort of thing.  The end users can
have work arounds while proper fixes are completed and fully tested.


Thanks,
Ben

>   
> 


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