Re: [PATCH] allow setting wiphy.perm_addr after driver probe

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Mon, 2014-08-11 at 13:56 -0700, Marcel Holtmann wrote:
> The initial wlan0 can be removed as every other netdev attached to the
> wiphy. It can also be as easily re-created.
> 
> Since the wiphy does not have a valid MAC address, my proposal here
> would be to just not create the wlan0 in the first place. This means
> that the wiphy can be still discovered via nl80211.

I repeat, currently wlan0 is *not* created.

> It also means that the wlan0 netdev needs to be created by userspace
> now. And a valid NL80211_ATTR_MAC be provided. Similar to what is
> already done for P2P devices at the moment. That should just solve the
> problem.

The creation of wlan0 already comes from userspace, but the PHY has its
own MAC.

> We really do not want to announce a netdev when registering the wiphy
> device and then having to mess with its MAC address via sysfs somehow.
> This all needs to be properly reflected over RTNL.
> 
Again, no netdev is announced. There just isn't a way to set the MAC of
the wiphy device itself.

How about this: What if the driver were to leave the MAC at all zeros
initially, and sysfs could set that if and only if it's all zeros at the
time?

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