[PATCH 1/9] wifi: mac80211: allow enabling chanctx until hw registration

[Sean Wang]

Hi Johannes,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 3:49 AM Johannes Berg <johannes at sipsolutions.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Sean,
>
> > It could be changed but it would break the consistency of the current
> > mt76 driver.
>
> I'm not really convinced ...
>
> > mt76 driver does the things in the following order
> > - ieee80211_alloc_hw (where an instance of "struct mt76_dev *" would be created)
> > - register bus operation into mt76 core (depending on struct mt76_dev
> > to provide an abstraction layer for mt76 core to access bus)
> > - read chip identifier (depending on bus operation)
> > - load the firmware capabilities (depending on chip identifier)
> > - initialize the hardware
> > ....
> > -ieee80211_register_hw
> >
> > If firmware capability is needed to load before ieee80211_alloc_hw, we
> > need to create kind of similar functions to read chip identifiers and
> > load firmware.
> > I know It may not a strong reason not to change, but if we can support
> > read firmware capabilities after alloc_hw, it provides flexibility to
> > the vendor driver
> > and helps mt7921 look more consistent and save a few changes across
> > different mt7921 bus drivers (mt7921 now supports SDIO, USB, PCIe type
> > driver).
>
> But you're loading _firmware_, so to determine the capabilities all you
> should need is the actual file, no? I mean, you don't even have to load
> it into the device. Like iwlwifi, you could have an indication (or many
> flags, or TLVs, or whatnot) in the file that says what it's capable of.
>
> > I kmemdup the const ops and ieee80211_alloc_hw with the duplicated ops
> > the duplicated ops would be updated by the actual firmware
> > capabilities before ieee80211_register_hw.
>
> Well ... yeah ok that works, but it's pretty wasteful, and also makes
> this a nice security attack target - there's a reason ops structs are
> supposed to be const, that's because they can then be really read-only
> and you can't have function pointer changes. Some of the CFI stuff is
> meant to help avoid that, but still ...
>
> So anyway. I'm not really sure I buy this - even you while doing this
> already kind of introduced a bug because you didn't change this code:
>
>         if (!use_chanctx || ops->remain_on_channel)
>                 wiphy->flags |= WIPHY_FLAG_HAS_REMAIN_ON_CHANNEL;
>
> I guess you didn't notice because you have remain_on_channel in the
> first place, but that's not the only code there assuming that we have
> the ops in place and they don't change.
>
> If we really, really need to allow changing the ops, then we should
> probably make a much larger change to not even pass the ops until
> register, though I'm not really sure it's worth it just to have mt7921
> avoid loading the firmware from disk before allocation?
>
> johannes

Thanks for your input. I thought I'd try to write a patch to follow up
on the idea you mentioned here.
    sean