[Cbe-oss-dev] [PATCH] PS3: gelic: ignore scan info from zero SSID beacons

[John W. Linville]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:50:37PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 17:18 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 13:15 +0900, Masakazu Mokuno wrote:
> > > Some implementations of the hidden SSID APs emit beacons which have the zero
> > > length SSID information element instead of SSID padded by null (\0) characters.
> > > If the firmware of the PS3 wireless hardware meets these beacons, it abandons parsing
> > > IEs. Thus guest OSes get the invalid scan information for the AP.
> > > 
> > > To work around this, ignore these scan informations from the list.
> > 
> > I'm not sure this is a good idea. Is there any way to get at decent
> > information from those beacons?
> 
> Yeah, there are quite a few of these out there.  Ideally the firmware
> wouldn't puke on it...

Is a firmware update a possibility?  We've had these discussions
before.  I doubt Sony is any more excited about a firmware spin than
Intel has been.

Does this problem apply to probe responses as well?  (Do probe
responses from hidden SSID APs still exclude the SSID?  I would
guess not.)

As long as you can still associate w/ hidden SSID APs, I don't see
a big problem.  Even if you can't, no information for those APs is
probably better than bad information, no?

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at tuxdriver.com