On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:23:35 -0500
"John W. Linville" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 08:03:43PM +0100, Stefan Rompf wrote:
> > Am Donnerstag 19 Januar 2006 16:56 schrieb John W. Linville:
> >
> > > The above represents my thinking on the issue. Ultimately the WiPHY
> > > (aka radio) device should be thought of as a new class of driver,
> > > distinct from a netdev. If we have to reroute some infrastructure
> > > (i.e. qdisc) to make that practical, we should do so.
> > >
> > > It makes the job bigger, but I think it is the right way to go.
> >
> > I couldn't disagree more. There is absolutely no point in duplicating
> > infrastructure used for queuing, qdisc interface, NAPI, managing multicast
> > reception, registration + reference count, statistics, etc. just to avoid
> > the
> > master device showing up in ifconfig.
>
> I don't believe I suggested this. I was implying that we teach the
> existing infrastructure how to deal with the wiphy device concept.
>
I would make the master device its own class device. The object hierarchy
is:
kobject
class_device (in /sys/class)
net_device (in /sys/class/net)
ether_device
Properties of net_device are:
takes network related ioctl's (legacy)
can be controled by netlink as a device
can transmit sk_buff's
can be scheduled with NAPI, ...
An ether_device is just a sub-class of net_device that takes a
certain frame format (and responds to ethtool).
If your master_device takes 802.11 packets as sk_buff's then it should
be a net_device.
If you need to stub somethings or do some object refactoring to split
out net_device finer than that makes sense to.
--
Stephen Hemminger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
OSDL http://developer.osdl.org/~shemminger
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
