[RFC][v1][Design] AP Architecture for Roaming with Wi-Fi 8 Seamless Mobility Domain (SMD)

[Aditya Sathish]

Continuing on a message excerpt I missed from Johannes' earlier response,
since it is in a similar vein to Benjamin's response:

On 10/12/2025 06:51, Johannes Berg wrote:
> That's not _really_ a good argument though - mac80211 will likely have
> to process this in process context, likely acquire wiphy mutex, etc.
The ST Execution sequence — which includes receiving the ST Execution
Request, sending context, receiving a status code from the target AP MLD,
and ultimately sending the ST Execution Response — is largely client-
driven. It primarily involves parsing management frame content and
handling context data embedded in the skb as extensions by the vendor
driver.

>From the target AP MLD side, we do need to access the generated group keys
to include in the ST Execution Response to the client. However, beyond that,
interaction with core wiphy data structures is minimal.

While it's likely that mac80211 will operate in process context, if our goal
is to minimize latency as much as possible, we believe it should be feasible
to implement the ST Execution logic without acquiring the wiphy mutex. This
could be achieved by isolating the ST Execution path and leveraging a
high-priority workqueue, thereby avoiding unnecessary contention and
improving latency. However, this is, admittedly, dependent on the tolerance
for complexity in the mac80211 versus the demonstrated benefit - which is
something we are gathering experimental data for.

> 
> johannes

Regards,
Aditya