[Prism54-devel] SIOCGIWNAME usage

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:

<-- Regarding display of IEEE 802.11 spec conformance on iwname -->

> I'd vote for this too (but what string do we return in-place? 802.11g?
> 802.11a? 802.11a/b/g? should the value be static, or dynamic based on
> whether we're running a,b,g or some combination of it? -- that's
> actually why I never bothered to bring the SIOCGIWNAME issue up... as
> it would require some thoughts about it ;)))
>
> but it wasn't me who implemented SIOCGIWNAME the way it is now; mcgrof
> introduced this sometime at the end of nov2003;
>
> mcgrof? what do you think about it? :-)

I think that *if* we want to display a correct IEEE 802.11 data transfer
specification we should just display the card's capabilities and not have
it change dynamically.

I do like it that our driver tells your your specific card model but as
I said before this should be dealt with at the pci list level since
lspci is the traditional method users use to find what devices they have;
and I have submitted updates, they're just pending. Our list is pretty big
though so I'll probably have to contact the mantainer directly so he
can just grab the ids from our supported cards page.

Since we already have cardmodel identification implemented, we can still
keep it and perhaps use it for verbosity at card probe time. I'll ask
Jean to see what he thinks about integrating specific card model
detection/displaying for the API and/or what to do in cases where IEEE
data transfer specifications can alter for cards.

If you're wondering where we got the idea of displaying card model name
at iwname it came from the original intersil source, which just displayed
a boring ISL3890.

I'll keep you posted.

	Luis