[pkg-wpa-devel] Debian 2.6.32 CONFIG_WIRELESS_OLD_REGULATORY, wireless-regdb and crda

[Paul Wise]

On Fri, 2010-01-29 at 10:54 -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:

> Exactly, this is already taken care of upstream with OpenSSL. The
> default directory is /etc/wireless-regdb/pubkeys/

Excellent.

> Patches for this are welcomed upstream on CRDA. Is this a requirement
> for Debian to package CRDA?

No, that was just my personal opinion.

Given the OpenSSL stuff in crda 1.1.1, I don't think there are any
technical roadblocks before crda/wireless-regdb can be uploaded to
Debian (once the packaging implements what I suggested). Debian just
needs someone to be the maintainer for it. IIRC Kel doesn't have the
time. I don't really want to take on yet more packages, but I could
probably offer sponsorship if Kel or others wanted to join pkg-wpa to do
the work. Someone on the Debian kernel team might also be willing to do
either sponsoring or maintainer-ship on this.

Please note that the Debian freeze for the squeeze release is planned
for March, so this stuff needs to be done soon.

> Some embedded solutions might make use of this but even today's
> embedded solutions like openwrt do use CRDA through userspace. The
> CFG80211_INTERNAL_REGDB motivational effort actually came out of the
> incentive to support new 2.6.32 drivers backported on older kernels
> which do not have generic netlink supported. If you want to backport
> proper CRDA support to older kernels and you will deal with proper
> kernel upgrades when regulatory updates are made this is a nice
> option. It also is a good way to finally remove the old crappy
> regulatory stuff we had which had only 3 static regulatory domains
> built in, instead now you can have properly updated static regulatory
> domains based on the same wireles-regdb db.txt.

OK, I guess that sounds reasonable.

> I know of no users yet of this, including on embedded systems. The way
> it works is it will first use the local database first and then call
> CRDA. If CRDA is present then it will update the regulatory
> information based on CRDA.

Great.

> > Any idea what proportion of wireless card firmware will respect what
> > Linux and crda tell it?
> 
> All wireless drivers respect this, regardless of if you have firmware or not.

Cool, but I would imagine ultimately it is up to the firmware to decide
if it will use its own regulatory data or trust what Linux says? 

> Actually all wireless drivers do benefit from it. Note that all new
> wireless drivers upstream are expected to be either cfg80211 based or
> mac80211 based, that's it. The new regulatory infrastructure is part
> of cfg80211 and since all mac80211 drivers are cfg80211 drivers that
> means *every* wireless driver benefits from this and uses it.

Excellent.

> I should note though that some firmware already have their regulatory
> stuff built-in to the firmware, just as some cards are configured on
> their EEPROM to use only one country. In those cases the regulatory
> infrastructure just helps regulatory compliance further, it would
> never allow more channels, for instance.

Hmmm, OK. I guess that makes sense. I imagine it will definitely be the
source of some annoyance for users in the future though.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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