DSS usage

[Aleksander Morgado]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 9:01 PM, Bjørn Mork <bjorn at mork.no> wrote:
> Of these, the dependecy on wwan0 is by far the worst IMHO.  And I would
> have loved to just "fix" that in the driver.  But when Arnaud first made
> me think about this, I realized that it wasn't really me who added
> that... It's really an inheritage of the multiplexing protocol.  There
> is no way you are going to transport those DSS fragments without
> cooperating with all the other users of the two bulk endpoints on the
> MBIM data interface.  There just has to be some top level policy manager
> here "owning" both the MBIM data and control channels. wwan0 represents
> the shared data channel, and /dev/cdc-wdm0 represents the shared control
> channel.  Both these resources must be managed by one application to
> facilitate resource sharing.

I'm personally not unhappy with the VLAN based API; it's just an API,
and it's convenient. If we can facilitate its usage by hiding within
libmbim all the VLAN/net interface bits to clients wanting to do DSS,
then we should definitely do that.

I'm more worried about the dependency on wwan0 that you point out,
though. Managing the lifecycle of the wwan interface in a single
user-space is going to be interesting, although in the worst case we
can focus on having it in e.g. the mbim-proxy, and have other programs
(e.g. NM) ask the proxy whether there are open DSS channels before
trying to put the interface down, or something like that. Well, at the
end there's usually just a program in the system managing the
lifecycle of the interface (the connection manager, like NM or ConnMan
or whatever)... the difference would just be where it really is
managed. For this case, it makes sense to have it in e.g. the
mbim-proxy, which is going to be a single instance program always
running whenever there is an MBIM communication. And the proxy should
handle not only multiple MBIM interactions from different processes,
but also multiple interactions with the net interface and its VLANs.
Worst case, we can even handle the interface ifup/ifdown ourselves in
the proxy (and ask connection managers not to play with that).

-- 
Aleksander
https://aleksander.es