[arch-projects] [netcfg] [PATCH 0/4] Connecting to wireless speedups

Thomas Bächler thomas at archlinux.org
Tue Jul 3 09:56:43 EDT 2012


Am 03.07.2012 13:44, schrieb Jouke Witteveen:
>> Instead, why not remodel this to use the same logic as
>> net-auto-wireless? Create the right wpa_supplicant configuration, start
>> wpa_s and let wpa_actiond bring up the interface? This seems much better
>> than hardcoded timeouts and wait loops inside shell scripts. And you do
>> not have to write much new code, everything's there.
>>
> 
> In that case, we should depend on and maintain wpa_actiond, which is
> not a bash script.
> I think it is possible to rewrite connections/wireless in a more
> netcfg way, that is: using plain scripting. Ideally, I see netcfg as
> just that: a collection of scripts to automate networking routines
> based on simple profile definitions.

The problem I saw here was this: Wireless connections can go up and down
all the time, and you have to act accordingly. What netcfg currently
does is this:

- Is the network there? No -> Fail
- Start the supplicant.
- wpa_cli status -> Are we connected? No -> Sleep and Repeat
- After a timeout: Fail.

It does not handle the case where connecting takes longer than the
timeout (for example, you are out of range and then move closer). It
does not handle the case where you lose the connection (although dhcpcd
re-acquires the lease nowadays, this was not always the case).

In short, netcfg may fail in cases where it shouldn't.

When writing net-auto-wireless (or its predecessor autowifi), I
considered the following: wpa_supplicant knows when the connection state
changes and has mechanisms to notify us. Let's use those mechanisms.
Sadly, 'wpa_cli -a' was not suited for this, as disconnecting and
reconnecting immediately lead to annoying race conditions (which
happened with my wireless constantly at the time). wpa_actiond is simply
a more clever version of 'wpa_cli -a'.


I don't really understand why anyone would prefer manually selecting the
wireless profile instead of running net-auto-wireless to automatically
choose. But even if you want to do that, you should not have all those
race conditions that result from the half-baked connection logic I
mentioned in the beginning.

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