[PATCH 01/13] wifi: cfg80211: Add provision to advertise multiple radio in one wiphy

[Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan]

On 4/12/2024 5:30 PM, James Dutton wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Apr 2024 at 09:02, Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan
> <quic_vthiagar at quicinc.com> wrote:
>> On 4/12/2024 1:08 PM, Nicolas Escande wrote:
>>> On Fri Apr 12, 2024 at 5:50 AM CEST, Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan wrote:
>>>> On 4/11/2024 10:09 PM, Maxime Bizon wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, 2024-04-11 at 21:56 +0530, Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for making it clear,
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>> For example, starting a 5Ghz AP in ax-only mode, and at the same
>>>>>>> time
>>>>>>> creating a STA interface on 2.4GHz ?
>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, such use cases continue to be supported in single wiphy mode.
>>>>>
>>>>> Understood, but I see some corner cases.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> For example, assume two bands AP hardware, 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
>>>>>
>>>>> Previously:
>>>>>      - phy0 is 2.4Ghz
>>>>>      - phy1 is 5Ghz
>>>>>      - iw phy phy0 interface create wlan0 type managed
>>>>>      - iw dev wlan0 scan
>>>>>
>>>>> => will only scan 2.4Ghz
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> With single phy approach:
>>>>>      - phy0 is 2.4Ghz + 5Ghz concurrent
>>>>>      - # iw phy phy0 interface create wlan0 type managed
>>>>>      - # iw dev wlan0 scan
>>>>>
> .> >>> => will scan both bands ?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes, both the bands will be scanned if freq list is not given
>>>>
>>>>>      - <starting from previous state>
>>>>>      - # iw phy phy0 interface create wlan1 type __ap
>>>>>      - # hostapd -i wlan1 <config>
>>>>>      - # iw dev wlan0 scan
>>>>>
>>>>> => what will happen then ?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Scan will be carried out on all the radios including the one on which AP interface is
>>>> running. Scan with freq list can be used not to disturb the radio of AP interface.
>>>>
>>>>>> Same goes for hostapd ACS, I assume specifying freqlist becomes
>>>>> mandatory or we can't predict which band the AP will be on ?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If no freq list is given, ACS will run through all the bands and select a channel from any
>>>> of the bands. But this can be optimized to do ACS and channels selection on a particular
>>>> band using channellist/freqlist hostapd configurations.
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> And in a (very unlikely) case that there are two underlying radios that can
>>> operate on the same frequencies, how would freqlist enable us to really select
>>> the underlying radio ?
>>>
>>
>> This can not be supported in this approach. As only the radios participating in MLO are
>> supposed to be combined under one wiphy, not sure if we have real use case to combine
>> radios of same frequencies.
>>
>> Vasanth
>>
> 
> Looking at this discussion, I think it would really be helped with
> some architectural diagrams describing the various combinations of
> components in an RF chain.
> 
> Let us take a single example.
> We have antennas, analogue front end, and ADCs (Analogue to digital converters)
> The features of those two are:
> 1)  Antennas can be optimised for particular frequencies.
> 2) The analogue front end has many different parameters, but for this
> discussion, the important one is:
> a) frequencies it can tune to.
> b) instantaneous bandwidth. I.e. When tuned to a particular frequency,
> what is the bandwidth around that frequency that one can receive.
> 3) ADC
> a) The Sample rate
> 
> Once the RF sample are in the digital domain one has the ADC ->
> DIgital Processing -> Output data
> If we assume that the ADC is set to receive the full instantaneous
> bandwidth, the digital processing can do a number of things.
> 1) process the full instantaneous bandwidth into a single channel of data.
> 2) process the instantaneous bandwidth into multiple sub bands, or
> multiple channels of data.
> 
> There is also the control endpoint that controls all these components.
> There can be multiple front ends for each ADC. multiple ADCs per
> Digital Processing.
> 
> A higher level process (maybe hostapd) can then speak to multiple
> Digital Processing and ADC, RF Front end components and then somehow
> has to manage and coordinate them all.
> 
> All these capabilities and varying arrangement of the various
> components need to be reported up to a higher level, in a common way,
> that can handle all possible arrangements.
> Once the higher level process has all this information, it can then
> manage to do everything necessary for Multi-Link operation (MLO).
> 

Exactly, that is what this patch series is trying to do. Advertising
per-underlying radio's capabilities to upper layer.

> So, to answer some of the questions in this thread.
> Scanning: The high level process should know what capabilities are
> available and what can be done in parallel or not. So it should be
> able to convert a request from a user, into a more detailed request
> down towards the hardware.
> I.e. User asks for scan.  High level process tells which bits of the
> hardware should do the scanning and across which frequencies.
> While it might sound complicated, when implemented correctly, it is
> just a matter of iterating over a  tree with a search match criteria.
> 

Current implementation does not change anything in scan function
wrt a wiphy. So there will be only one scan at anytime for a wiphy.
Possible enhancements can be discussed and added in future.

Vasanth