Monitor interface for P2P

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 03:44:43PM -0700, Ecco (Inhyang) Park wrote:
> I am working on P2P on CFG80211 driver with full-mac firmware.
> 
> As I understand driver_nl80211.c, driver_nl80211.c considers monitor  interface for GO to send and receive a frame.
> However currently I do not use mac80211 driver, so we cannot support monitor interface.
> 
> I think that we can use p2p interface instead of monitor interface receive mgmt frame if we do not support monitor interface.

What do you mean with "p2p interface" and how would you receive (and
send) management frames using it?

> P2P is working fine on CFG80211 driver using p2p interface without monitor interface.
> In order to make P2P work, I modified codes in driver_nl80211.c.
> 
> Do we have to use monitor interface every time ?

The current nl80211 implementation is hardcoded to use monitor interface
in some cases, but it should certainly be possible to extend this to use
other mechanisms (e.g., the existing nl80211 commands/events for sending
management/action frames). AP mode functionality uses monitor interface
for sending and receiving EAPOL frames which will also need to be
modified to use the normal data frames instead. This has some
implications to multi-SSID/BSSID support, so those need to be kept in
mind when doing the change. In addition, there may be need for providing
a new driver capability advertisement to allow wpa_supplicant (or
hostapd) to figure out which mechanism to use for sending/receiving
frames.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA