mac80211: hardware scan rework
The scan code in mac80211 makes the software scan assumption in various places. For example, we stop the Tx queue during a software scan so that all the Tx packets will be queued by the stack. We also drop frames not related to scan in the software scan process. But these are not true for hardware scan. Some wireless hardwares (for example iwl3945/4965) has the ability to perform the whole scan process by hardware and/or firmware. The hardware scan is relative powerful in that it tries to maintain normal network traffic while doing a scan in the background. Some drivers (i.e iwlwifi) do provide a way to tune the hardware scan parameters (for example if the STA is associated, what's the max time could the STA leave from the associated channel, how long the scans get suspended after returning to the service channel, etc). But basically this is transparent to the stack. mac80211 should not stop Tx queues or drop Rx packets during a hardware scan. This patch resolves the above problem by spliting the current scan indicator local->sta_scanning into local->sta_sw_scanning and local->sta_hw_scanning. It then changes the scan related code to be aware of hardware scan or software scan in various places. With this patch, iwlwifi performs much better in the scan-while-associated condition and disable_hw_scan=1 should never be required. Cc: Mohamed Abbas <mohamed.abbas@intel.com> Cc: Ben Cahill <ben.m.cahill@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Zhu Yi <yi.zhu@intel.com> Acked-by: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> Signed-off-by: John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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