• Kalle Valo's avatar
    nl80211: add power save commands · ffb9eb3d
    Kalle Valo authored
    The most needed command from nl80211, which Wireless Extensions had,
    is support for power save mode. Add a simple command to make it possible
    to enable and disable power save via nl80211.
    
    I was also planning about extending the interface, for example adding the
    timeout value, but after thinking more about this I decided not to do it.
    Basically there were three reasons:
    
    Firstly, the parameters for power save are very much hardware dependent.
    Trying to find a unified interface which would work with all hardware, and
    still make sense to users, will be very difficult.
    
    Secondly, IEEE 802.11 power save implementation in Linux is still in state
    of flux. We have a long way to still to go and there is no way to predict
    what kind of implementation we will have after few years. And because we
    need to support nl80211 interface a long time, practically forever, adding
    now parameters to nl80211 might create maintenance problems later on.
    
    Third issue are the users. Power save parameters are mostly used for
    debugging, so debugfs is better, more flexible, interface for this.
    For example, wpa_supplicant currently doesn't configure anything related
    to power save mode. It's better to strive that kernel can automatically
    optimise the power save parameters, like with help of pm qos network
    and other traffic parameters.
    
    Later on, when we have better understanding of power save, we can extend
    this command with more features, if there's a need for that.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarKalle Valo <kalle.valo@nokia.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohn W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>
    ffb9eb3d
cfg80211.h 76.1 KB