From: Jean Tourrilhes (jt_at_bougret.hpl.hp.com)
Date: 2002-06-14 16:36:09 UTC
On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 10:41:34PM -0700, Keith Smith wrote:
>
> Not to beat a dead horse or anything... The only thing I can think of
> is an external table for wireless tools to look up the card somehow.
> That way you could map +-63 to something meaningful on a per-card
> basis. Most of the cards I see claim between 10-16 as the max
> power they will put out. This might add too much needless crap though.
>
> "You are in a maze of twisty standards all different".
>
> While we are on the subject. It appears that the power level "floats"
> if it is not explicitly set, is this correct? Is there a way to
> return to "floating" once you set the power? If this is in some docs
> somewhere just flame, and I'll look again. :)
>
> - --
> Keith Smith
The philosophy of Wireless Extension is that everything presented to user space is standard and generic and all the card specific stuff is handled in the driver.
There is something like 20 drivers using Wireless Extensions. And there is something like 10 various tools using Wireless Extensions. I'm not going to put 20 card specific tables in 10 tools. No way.
If it's impossible to map those values to sane and standard values, we should not try to do it and just present them as relative (the same way signal level and sensitivity can be dBm or relative). If there is a way to convert them, the driver should do it.
Regards,
Jean