[RFC 1/2] nl80211: add common API to configure SAR power limitations.

[Brian Norris]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 3:10 AM Carl Huang <cjhuang at codeaurora.org> wrote:
> On 2020-11-05 16:35, Kalle Valo wrote:
> > Brian Norris <briannorris at chromium.org> writes:
> >> On Tue, Nov 3, 2020 at 11:32 PM Carl Huang <cjhuang at codeaurora.org>
> >> wrote:
> >>> On 2020-11-04 10:00, Brian Norris wrote:
> >>> > What are the ABI guarantees around a given driver/chip's 'sar_capa'?
> >>> > Do we guarantee that if the driver supports N ranges of certain bands,
> >>> > that it will always continue to support those bands?

To be clear: the answer here is "no." So we have to map out what the
user/kernel interaction looks like when they change.

> >> ...
> >>> For a given chip(at least a QCOM chip), we don't see that the
> >>> range will grow or change.
> >>
> >> That's good to know. But that's not quite the same as an ABI
> >> guarantee.
> >
> > I'm not sure if I understood Brian's question correctly, but I have
> > concerns on the assumption that frequency ranges never change. For
> > example, in ath10k we have a patch[1] under discussion which adds more
> > channels and in ath11k we added 6 GHz band after initial ath11k support
> > landed. And I would not be surprised if in some boards/platforms a
> > certain band is disabled due to cotting costs (no antenna etc).

Right, I certainly was not taking the "never change bands" claim from
Carl at face value ;) This is exactly why I was asking.

> > My
> > preference is to have a robust interface which would be designed to
> > handle these kind of changes.

Sure.

> > [1] [PATCH] ath10k: enable advertising support for channels 32, 68 and
> > 98
>
> So the trick here is even if more channels are supported, it doesn't
> mean
> that it can support different SAR setting on these new channels. In this
> case,
> it likely falls into 5G range. It's safe for driver to extend the 5G
> range and
> doesn't break userspace. (68 and 98 are already in the 5G range, so
> driver just
> extends the start edge freq to 32 here.).

You can't just wave your hands and say it "doesn't break userspace" --
you have to think about how user space can use this API.

Specifically, consider that user space is not going to memorize
indeces, as those are per-driver implementation details; it's going to
memorize frequency bands. It wants to cross reference those with the
results of the GET/DUMP API before it translates those into indeces
for SET. As you're describing it, user space will have to have some
kind of "fuzziness" to its logic -- today, it thinks the 5G band is
[X,Y], but tomorrow it might expand to [X-N, Y+M]. So user space
should just ensure that it configures any band that intersects with
[X,Y], even though it didn't know about [X-N,X] or [Y,Y+M]? That logic
covers splits too, I suppose.

There's still the question of ranges that user space has no knowledge
of (i.e., no intersection with any known [X,Y]). I think there's two
approaches that are roughly equivalent:
1) require SET operations to specify all bands, and designate a NULL
or MAX value that user space should use for unknown/unconfigured bands
[or, user space uses some kind of "extension" from the nearest known
band, just to be safe?]
2) allow SET operations to specify a subset of supported bands [gray
area: what happens with the unconfigured band(s)? left as-is? use
max?]

We're approximately in #1 right now. If we're explicit about how
that's supposed to work, then I think we can stay with that. Although
it sounds like Carl is moving toward #2 (allow subsets).

> But for flexibility, given 6 GHz as example here, let's keep the
> explicit
> index for SET command. For sar_capa advertisement, the explicit index is
> dropped as Johannes suggested. New ranges can only be appended to
> existing
> ones. Like Brian said, only add or split is allowed.

> The complexity to
> handle
> splitted range Vs whole range is left to WLAN driver itself.

Hmm? I thought we're keeping the driver simple. I'm OK with that (and
moving a little more complexity into user space) as long as we're
clear about it.

Brian

> Userspace can SET any ranges which are advertised by WLAN driver. It's
> not required to set all ranges and userspace can skip any ranges.