conflict between netif and pccard_ether...

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday, June 18, 2014 7:13:18 pm John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> So, I recently was trying to figure out why wireless on my notebook
> wouldn't work..  I would boot up the machine w/o the wireless
> configured, uncomment the lines in rc.conf, and then run
> "service netif start"...
> 
> Wireless would associate, but when disconnect... After some
> investigation, it turns out that two copies of wpa_supplicant are
> being launched... I believe one from netif, and another from
> pccard_ether launched by devd...
> 
> The issue is that both netif and pccard_ether "claim" ownership of
> them.  pccard_ether will ignore the ifconfig_ line if NOAUTO is
> specified.  IMO, we need to make one or the other "own" configuring
> and launching the interface...
> 
> There is also the issue that wpa_sup doesn't use proper locking on
> the pidfile and allows two copies to be launched...  My thoughts
> is to convert it to pidfile to fix this issue the easiest...

I think this is actually the best fix.  dhclient handles this correctly for 
this reason.

> Comments?  Suggestions?

We had a thread a few months ago about this very topic and I committed changes 
to the rc.d scripts that I then had to revert because it broke other use 
cases.  Having the redundant start be harmless is the simplest way to handle 
this.

-- 
John Baldwin