Re: What changed in rc.d infrastructure in last months?

> On Oct 25, 2015, at 12:46, Lev Serebryakov <lev_at_FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello NGie,
> 
> Sunday, October 25, 2015, 10:39:51 PM, you wrote:
> 
> 
>> It’s documented here:
> 
>>                 On the other hand, if you want to configure your wireless
>>                 interface with hostapd(8), you need to add ``HOSTAP'' to the
>>                 ifconfig_<interface> variable.  hostapd(8) will use the
>>                 settings from /etc/hostapd-<interface>.conf
> I understand this, and as you can see from my config samples, I'm using
> exactly this feature.
> 
> I'm wonder why ifconfig & hostapd try to start TWICE now for same
> interaface in course of normal boot now. It was not case in, say, r285355.

These commits are probably why — in particular now all net80211 devices post-r287394/r287398 are being restarted via /etc/pccard_ether, which will trigger /etc/rc.d/netif (which doesn’t make sense because iwn, etc _aren’t_ pcmcia devices).
Sidenote, fixing bug 202726 might fix this case with [serial] boot. I’ll need to double-check the rcorder and get back to you on that.
Thanks,
-NGie

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r287398 | glebius | 2015-09-02 07:38:16 -0700 (Wed, 02 Sep 2015) | 4 lines

Add iwm(4), that was missing in r287394.

Submitted by:   Shawn Webb

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r287394 | glebius | 2015-09-02 05:46:42 -0700 (Wed, 02 Sep 2015) | 11 lines

Fix dynamic attach/detach of 802.11 devices after r287197:

o In pccard_ether add code to start children of a 802.11
  device, that are configured in rc.conf.
o In devd.conf provide a regex matching all 802.11 devices,
  and on match run pccard_ether to spawn children.

PR:             202784
Submitted by:   <vidwer gmail.com>
In collaboration with:  "Oleg V. Nauman" <oleg opentransfer.com>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r287197 | glebius | 2015-08-27 01:56:39 -0700 (Thu, 27 Aug 2015) | 43 lines

Replay r286410. Change KPI of how device drivers that provide wireless
connectivity interact with the net80211 stack.

Historical background: originally wireless devices created an interface,
just like Ethernet devices do. Name of an interface matched the name of
the driver that created. Later, wlan(4) layer was introduced, and the
wlanX interfaces become the actual interface, leaving original ones as
"a parent interface" of wlanX. Kernelwise, the KPI between net80211 layer
and a driver became a mix of methods that pass a pointer to struct ifnet
as identifier and methods that pass pointer to struct ieee80211com. From
user point of view, the parent interface just hangs on in the ifconfig
list, and user can't do anything useful with it.

Now, the struct ifnet goes away. The struct ieee80211com is the only
KPI between a device driver and net80211. Details:

- The struct ieee80211com is embedded into drivers softc.
- Packets are sent via new ic_transmit method, which is very much like
  the previous if_transmit.
- Bringing parent up/down is done via new ic_parent method, which notifies
  driver about any changes: number of wlan(4) interfaces, number of them
  in promisc or allmulti state.
- Device specific ioctls (if any) are received on new ic_ioctl method.
- Packets/errors accounting are done by the stack. In certain cases, when
  driver experiences errors and can not attribute them to any specific
  interface, driver updates ic_oerrors or ic_ierrors counters.

Details on interface configuration with new world order:
- A sequence of commands needed to bring up wireless DOESN"T change.
- /etc/rc.conf parameters DON'T change.
- List of devices that can be used to create wlan(4) interfaces is
  now provided by net.wlan.devices sysctl.

Most drivers in this change were converted by me, except of wpi(4),
that was done by Andriy Voskoboinyk. Big thanks to Kevin Lo for testing
changes to at least 8 drivers. Thanks to pluknet_at_, Oliver Hartmann,
Olivier Cochard, gjb_at_, mmoll_at_, op_at_ and lev_at_, who also participated in
testing.

Reviewed by:    adrian
Sponsored by:   Netflix
Sponsored by:   Nginx, Inc.