Messages in this thread |  | | | Subject | Re: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing | | From | Dan Williams <> | | Date | Mon, 02 Oct 2006 15:22:03 -0400 |
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On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 11:55 -0700, Jean Tourrilhes wrote: > On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:15:37AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > > On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:58:24 -0400 > > > > > > You have a mismatch between your wireless-tools, your kernel, and/or > > > wpa_supplicant. WE-21 uses the _real_ ssid length rather than the > > > kludge of hacking off the last byte used previously. Please ensure that > > > your tools, driver, and kernel are using WE-21. > > > 'cat /proc/net/wireless' should tell you what your kernel is using. > > > Getting the driver WE is a bit harder and you may have to look at the > > > source. > > > > Jean, John: the amount of trouble which this change is causing is quite > > high considering that we're not even at -rc1 yet. It's going to get worse. > > We have to split between the different issues we have seen. > Tools issue (the wpa_supplicant problem). -> those can only be > fixed by people upgrading. Fortunately, there are not so many tools > affected, and new version of those tools were released last > April/May. As I said, most distro have those in the pipe. > In-Kernel driver issues (the Orinoco driver problem). -> those > can be patched and fixed as we go along. I would not worry about > those. > Out-of-kernel issues (the ipw3945 driver problem). -> those > drivers need to be updated. That's the problem of living outside the > kernel. Very often those drivers are reactive with respect to kernel > API changes, rather than pro-active, so there is not much we can do. > > > It doesn't sound like it'll be too hard to arrange for the kernel to > > continue to work correctly with old userspace? > > Actually, it's impossible. New userspace can work across both > version, old userspace fails on new version. > > The whole point of the -rc process is to find problems and the > scope of it, there is no way I can know everything. At this point, we > can decide if WE-21 should go in 2.6.19 or wait for 2.6.20. But I know > that most Linux-Wireless people such as Dan and Jouni have been > waiting impatiently for those changes...
Right; we need to get this settled and we need to figure out a way with Wireless Extensions to allow exact SSIDs to be sent and retrieved from the card/driver. How much cruft do we add to drivers and/or WE bits to bend over backwards and preserve compatibility with a lot of older bits? I can think of a few ways here to preserve backwards compat, but most involve adding bits to 3 places in each driver and a new flag to WE, which puts us right back in the same situation we're in right now; inconsistent drivers and poor semantics both inside and outside the kernel.
Maybe the answer here _is_ to bend over backwards to preserve compatibility, restore null-termination-and-increment-length bits in drivers and WE, and kludge all the user-space tools. Then just Do The Right Thing with nl80211/cfg80211 (whenever they come around) and fix stuff up in the nl80211 WE compat layer. I don't know. But nl80211 isn't here yet, and it's unclear when it will be.
Dan
> Have fun... > > Jean
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