Re: [patch] don't display very-low-strength APs.

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 15:47 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> As featured in several award-winning news reports[1], Cambridge has a
> lot of wireless networks.  I finally got strength working on the Cisco
> AiroNet card, and I see that many of those networks have no strength
> whatsoever.
> 
> My Mac only shows a few access points, effectively filtering the crappy
> access points out.
> 
> Attached patch filters out access points at or below 1% strength.  In
> addition to not displaying worthless AP's, this keeps the number of
> transient networks down--less falling in and out of display.
> 
> The one concern is if any wireless cards with broken strength detection
> return zero for all strength.  I've only seen 100% returned, so I think
> this is okay.

Hmm, my concern with this is that not all cards do support this yet, and
not all cards conform to the WEXT spec.  For instance, ipw2100 cards
don't seem to work with the latest stable ipw2100 driver.  The all show
0 strength.

Before I patched the cisco driver to fix wireless strength (which got
accepted and applied to 2.6.12), they all showed 0 strength too.

I don't think we're at a point where we can flip the switch.  It would
also be nice to have NM trigger a network switch if the current network
is < 5% for at least 2 scans, and there's another network in range,
stuff like that.  But I don't feel comfortable doing this yet until more
drivers get fixed to conform to the spec.

Dan