Regardless of whether the hardware implements beacon filtering,
there's no need to process all beacons in software all the time
throughout the stack (mac80211 does a lot, then cfg80211, then
in the future possibly userspace).
This patch implements the "best possible" beacon filtering in
mac80211. "Best possible" means that it can look for changes in
all requested information elements, and distinguish vendor IEs
by their OUI.
In the future, we will add nl80211 API for userspace to request
information elements and vendor IE OUIs to watch -- drivers can
then implement the best they can do while software implements
it fully.
It is unclear whether or not this actually saves CPU time, but
the data is all in the cache already so it should be fairly
cheap. The additional _testing_, however, has great benefit;
Without this, and on hardware that doesn't implement beacon
filtering, wrong assumptions about, for example, scan result
updates could quickly creep into code.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
Signed-off-by: John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>
d91f36db51