[PATCH] add frequency to network block config

Jouni Malinen jkmaline at cc.hut.fi
Mon Sep 11 23:18:02 EDT 2006


On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 08:48:31AM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 10:15 +0200, Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:

> > Nice addition - but personally I would prefer to be able to specify
> > the channel number instead of the frequency.
> 
> Jouni, do you have any preference?  I guess I'd prefer frequency because
> channel numbers vary a ton across different standards, while frequency
> is always unique.  And its quite easy to map channel <-> frequency based
> on what drivers return from SIOCGIWRANGE (as long as the stupid drivers
> get it right).

Well, at least I've implemented this once using channel number, so maybe
that could be interpreted as a preference. ;-) However, I did not like
that implementation enough to convince me to merge it into my CVS
version. One drawback of using channel number is that that number is not
unique (e.g., channel 8 is valid for both IEEE 802.11g and IEEE
802.11a), so some additional configuration is needed (e.g., selection
between 802.11g, 802.11a, 802.11b).

Anyway, I'm in the process of merging in some Devicescape code into
hostapd for configuring the channel and it is indeed using channel
number and hw_mode=a/g/b. Therefore, it would probably be best to keep
wpa_supplicant consistent with same style of configuration and just do
this with channel/hw_mode. Actually, I've already used that in mlme.c,
i.e., frequency is only used in wpa_supplicant driver interface and
other parts of the code are likely to end up using <hw_mode,channel> for
this.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA



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