[Prism54-devel] SIOCGIWNAME usage

[Jean Tourrilhes]

Luis R. Rodriguez  wrote :
> 
> 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.

	That must be me ;-)
	The card model is not wireless specific, for example Ethernet
card also have model name, so it should be handled at the level of a
more generic API, such as lspci or Ethtool. Actually, "ethtool -i"
almost has what you need.

	The intent of SIOCGIWNAME today is to show the capacity of the
card, so that a application knows what it can do with it. That should
be fairly static. Listing the capacity of the driver or the current
mode of the card are good approximation.
	The idea there is that if two users want to know if there
respective card are compatible, they would look at this value and
check if they have some letter in common.
	You may want to check quickly what madwifi decided to do here.

	With respect to SIOCSIWNICKN : This IOCTL should probably
never been added to the API, but kept as private, as it has zero
impact on the protocol. But, so many of the 802.11b cards were
implementing it... So, don't feel too bad and allow yourself to abuse
it as you wish to return useful information. The TI-ACX100 already use
it to display the driver version, but displaying the card model number
is a better idea.

	Have fun...

	Jean