Re: [Ieee80211-devel] eth0 vs. wlan0 [was Re: ieee80211 patches]

[Pedro R. <ram...@se...>]

Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I noticed that wireless patches are now in the mainline. That is good,
> patches are getting smaller, but it is going to make future user
> interface changes harder; and thats very bad.
> 
> There are good reasons to have wireless interfaces as wlanX, with
> tcpdump showing wireless packetes, etc; but current patches name it
> ethX, and you get plain ethernet packets on tcpdump. Are we going to
> keep showing wireless interfaces as ethernet ones forever, or do we
> plan to switch to wlanX? If we decide to switch, we should either
> switch before 2.6.14, or disable wireless before 2.6.14 so that we do
> not confuse users too badly...
> 								Pavel

Hi!

I don't think the interface name matters, it can also be changed at
runtime from userspace. Software shouldn't rely on the name to switch
it's behaviour. In your example tcpdump should not look for the name. It
should instead look at the link encapsulation or wireless extensions
capabilities. However i agree that there must be a consistent default in
the kernel and even in the out-of-tree drivers (although in this case
this is currently not enforceable).
If we expect the ieee80211 stuff to evolve into it's own stack, i think
it could be wise to make the default wireless interfaces name default to
something else other than eth%d.

On the subject of the inclusion of ieee80211, ipw2x00 drivers and other
netdev tree's changes into mainline, it's hard for me to understand why
the "versions" of these components are so old compared to the versions
currently being released by the ieee80211, ipw2100, ipw2200 projects.
If someone could enlighten me on this subject it would be appreciated.

Thanks!
-- 
Pedro Ramalhais