[PATCH] Scan other networks first to unlock 5GHz bands on Intel cards

[James Prestwood]

Hi,

On 8/10/24 2:50 AM, Taavi Eomäe wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Not the submitter of the patch, but I think this is needed because of 
> Intel's Location Aware Regulatory (LAR). If a scan is not done 
> beforehand, all 5GHz channels are marked as NO-IR.
>
> This is incredibly inconvenient, but indeed a quirk with Intel cards. 
> There's also an open Bugzilla ticket about it: 
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206469
>
> It also has the nasty side-effect of making 6GHz APs practically 
> impossible to start.
My 2 cents: this is actually a common "feature" of many self-managed 
wifi cards. Until the regulatory domain is established frequencies are 
either disabled/NO-IR due to legal requirements. From the station side 
of things you already are scanning on startup, so things just work. Not 
sure how APs are supposed to deal with this, maybe "real" AP vendors use 
custom firmware that allows you to set the country explicitly?
>
> On 03/08/2024 11:55, Jouni Malinen wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 07:56:04PM +0000, Pedro Goncalves (developer 
>> account) wrote:
>>> Subject: [PATCH] For intel Wi-Fi cards, force to scan other wireless 
>>> networks so the drive is able to set the correct region - master
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Pedro Goncalves <pgoncalves-developer at protonmail.com>
>> This would need much more detailed commit message to justify why this is
>> needed and why this is appropriate behavior. How is this specific to
>> Intel cards? Why would an AP be allowed to operate on the 5 GHz band
>> based on just a single scan if it was not allowed to do so without that
>> scan?
>>
>>> Index: src/ap/hostapd.h
>>> IDEA additional info:
>>> Subsystem: com.intellij.openapi.diff.impl.patch.CharsetEP
>>> <+>UTF-8
>>> ===================================================================
>>> diff --git a/src/ap/hostapd.h b/src/ap/hostapd.h
>> And this format is pretty strange and requires manual operations to
>> apply with 'git am'.
>>
>
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