Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 31 Dec 2014 23:30:11 +0100 | From | Arend van Spriel <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable" |
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On 12/31/14 22:44, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 09:32:13PM +0100, Arend van Spriel wrote: >> >> Agree. I can't even recall using "ip" ever. iw help system does provide >> command specific help. The phy keyword is both a command and a selector key, >> which I realize is confusing to the user, eg. 'iw help info' does provide >> help for the 'info' subcommand. > > Yeah, the confusing part is that "ip" tends to use "verb object" > scheme, which is consistent with the Cisco IOS command set it was > trying to emulate. So for ip, you do something like > > ip link info eth0 > > Where as for "iw" it's almost exactly backwards, i.e.: > > iw wlan0 info > > It's actually rather unfortunate that there is no consistency between > many of these tools, for example: > > ethtool --show-features eth0 > > If we were going to create a new interface, wouldn't be nice if we > could have some kind of consistency? Sigh; oh well, water under the > bridge at this point.
And on that water there are different ships with different captains ;-)
>> Thanks. If there are still drivers, upstream or out-of-tree, providing only >> WEXT API this will not work unless iwconfig/iwlist can distinguish those >> from cfg80211-based drivers (which is possible) and fallback to WEXT ioctl >> syscalls. Just not sure if it is worth the effort. As you stated below, it >> does not seem "evil" to retain WEXT if that is providing users what they >> need. > > Is it really that much effort? Unless there is some license > incompatibility nonsense (i.e., GPLv2 vs GPLv3), the code's already > there in the wireless-tools source. It would just be a matter of > trying the new ioctls first, and then falling back to the WEXT ones if > needed, right?
I don't think it is much effort. I think the nl80211 netlink api is not an ioctl, but yeah it seems trivial. But if WEXT needs to stay for people using WEXT-only drivers, it may be fine to keep cfg80211 wext compatibility in place.
Regards, Arend
> Cheers, > > - Ted
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