[PATCH] hostapd: allow disabling background radar

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2022 at 07:43:40AM -0700, Ben Greear wrote:
> 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.

OK, that is not convenient.

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

This type of capability should really not be enabled in the driver
before it has been properly tested.. I was under the impression that
this had been tested, but apparently not sufficiently.

> 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.

It would be much more understandable to make this disabled by default
rather than providing an obscure configuration parameter that the user
would somehow need to figure out when to use to disable it if things
don't work. I don't think it would be a good approach to introduce this
type of parameters to manually disable something that might not work
under some conditions.

I would be much more likely to accept a change that would disable this
recently added capability by default and provide a new option to enable
it. Should the driver side functionality become more robust in the
future, this new configuration option in hostapd could then be change to
default to having this capability enabled or even better, remove that
configuration parameter completely once there are no known issues in
commonly used kernel versions.
 
-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA