ifunit and struct ifnet/ieee80211com

[Brooks Davis]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 03:23:21PM +1000, Phillip Crumpler wrote:
> Hi hackers,
> 
> A few questions re. ifunit and struct ifnet/ieee80211com, if anyone can 
> help me out:
> 
> I assume that for a wireless interface ifunit will return a pointer to a 
> struct ieee80211com. Is there any way to tell which of these I have, so 
> I don't try to access ieee80211com members in a struct that is actually 
> the smaller infet? Both ethernet and wireless ethernet seem to use 
> if_type == 6 (IFT_ETHER) and if_physical == 0. Can I distinguish which 
> type I have or should I just make sure I know beforehand?

You need to know that the struct ifnet is actually embeded in a struct
ieee80211com if you want to access the members.  In properly designed
code this won't generally be ambiguious.  If you some how manage to get
into a state where it is, if_dname is probably your best bet.  That sort
of thing is discouraged though.

> Also, what is the lifetime of the (struct ifnet *) that ifunit returns? 
> If an interface goes away is the ifnet freed, leaving me with a dangling 
> pointer, or is it kept but marked inactive in some way?

There is currently no assurance that a pointer to a struct ifnet is
valid.  If you're going to hold a pointer over anything but trivial
operations, don't.  Hold the index and us ifnet_byindex instead.
Currently that also dies since it returns NULL after attach, but I plan
to look in to returning a special dead_if to avoid crashes.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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