Re: NM and NM applet quality status update

[Sven <sr12 duke edu>]

thanks for trying to make the WEXT specifications more explicit. without
having good and understandable guidelines it will be hard to have the
drivers changed. and thanks for clearing up some of my
misunderstandings! 

as a future bonus, do you think it's reasonable to provide the users not
just with the "link quality" (qual), but also "signal strength" (level)
and SNR (provided there is a uniform definition of what is meant by
"noise"), as some wireless utilities do?

Sven
On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 12:16 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> So I didn't answer a couple mails about the quality stuff yesterday because I 
> was working through it.  A few points:
> 
> 1) The applet was using the quality information from the active _network_, not 
> the active _device_.  I fixed that.  The problem is that we can get much better 
> quality statistics for the device (using SIOCGIWSTATS) than we can from the 
> individual networks (which is from the scan information).  Some cards don't 
> provide quality data from scans, or don't fill in the right information.  This 
> should fix some of the quality issues people were seeing.
> 
> 2) The NM method of determining quality in nm_wireless_qual_to_percent() was 
> busted as Bill has already pointed out, I've tried to fix that somewhat.  
> Instead of using Bill's method directly, I've re-worked that code (still using 
> Bill's method for some of it) to be conformant to my understanding of the WEXT 
> quality spec, which I've actually posted my understanding of to netdev list:
> 
> http://oss.sgi.com/projects/netdev/archive/2005-02/msg00149.html
> 
> If my understanding is in error, then I'll fix that assumption in the code in 
> NetworkManagerWireless.c.  Otherwise, we get to fix the drivers.  I've decided 
> that its not worth working around and special-casing driver problems here, if 
> its busted for particular cards, people will have more incentive to get it fixed 
> :)
> 
> This may necessitate updating the ipw2200 patch, Bill, to bring it into line 
> with WEXT API.
> 
> I'll be committing this code soon, once I figure out a few more things.
> 
> Dan
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