linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable"

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Date:	Wed, 31 Dec 2014 23:30:11 +0100
From:	Arend van Spriel <arend@...adcom.com>
To:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>, Jiri Kosina <jkosina@...e.cz>,
	"Grumbach, Emmanuel" <emmanuel.grumbach@...el.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
	"linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org" <linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"egrumbach@...il.com" <egrumbach@...il.com>,
	"peter@...leysoftware.com" <peter@...leysoftware.com>,
	"ilw@...ux.intel.com" <ilw@...ux.intel.com>,
	"Berg, Johannes" <johannes.berg@...el.com>,
	Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@...inger.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable"

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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