Re: Flush scan list on resume



Dan Williams wrote:
On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 18:04 -0500, Tony Espy wrote:
Dan Williams wrote:
So here's why old access points show up after resume...

Executive summary: exclusively a *driver* problem


Detailed explanation:

Most kernel drivers use 'jiffies' as the timestamp for each scan result.
jiffies is a kernel counter that counts *while the kernel is alive*, and
thus does not reflect time spent in suspend and hibernate.

When the supplicant requests scan results from the driver on resume, the
supplicant (and NM) gets back a list of scan results with recent-looking
timestamps that do not reflect the time the machine was suspended.

The solutions are to move drivers to using the actual machine clock (the
kernel equivalent of time(2)) for last_beacon, or to be more agressive
about expiring entries on resume with something like (10 - time spent in
sleep).

OK. Having looked in my wireless-testing tree, I see that most of the drivers are now just allowing mac80211 to handle scanning, so this is not a per-driver issue. At least that makes the scope of fixing easier to manage.

How 'bout getting drivers to add code to their resume functions that
just clears the scan results queue?

I was actually thinking it makes sense to clear results on suspend, no reason to keep kmem allocated at that point. (No point in saving an obsolete queue on a hibernate, after all.)

That's not desirable on mobile platforms like OLPC that do
suspend/resume very quickly and very often.  The best mechanism is to
make the *actual* last seen time available to the userspace programs
that implement the policy (like connection managers) so they can do
what's appropriate.

OK. I suggest a compromise then, since fetching kernel time will also be expensive if done frequently - just fetch it at driver load and resume time, and store it as a <base> in the driver. Cache entries then store base+jiffy. This allows cache stamps to continue to be cheap, but also solves the sleep/resume mismatch.

--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/


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