Stuffed Crust wrote:
On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 03:55:55PM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
I really don't see why a plain STA mode card should be required to carry
around all the code required for AP operation -- handling associations
of clients, powersave management wrt. buffering, ... Sure, fragmentation
From the perspective of the hardware driver, there is little AP or
STA-specific code, especially when IBSS is thrown in. Thick MACs
excepted, there's little more than "frame tx/rx, and hardware control
twiddling".
The AP/STA smarts happen in the 802.11 stack. And, speaking from
experience, it is very hard to separate them cleanly, at least not
without incurring even more overall complexity and bloat.
It's far simpler to build them intertwined, then add a bunch of #ifdefs
if you want to disable AP or STA mode individually to save space.
Perhaps you haven't hit some of the more recent standards that place
more of a burden on the ap implementation? Also some vendor-specific
protocol features suck up space for ap mode only and it is nice to be
able to include them only as needed.
There are several advantages to splitting up the code such as reduced
audit complexity and real space savings but I agree that it is an open
question whethere there's a big gain to modularizing the code by
operating mode.
Sam
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