IEEE80211_BMISS(9)

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay so <pink>ieee80211_bmiss</pink> — that's the 802.11 beacon miss support situation, and yes bestie it's exactly as iconic as it sounds 💅✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

#include <net80211/ieee80211_var.h>

void
ieee80211_beacon_miss(struct ieee80211com *);

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So the net80211 software layer is out here providing a whole support framework for drivers, and part of that glow-up includes handling beacon miss events in station mode 🎀. Drivers can dispatch beacon miss events that got recognized in hardware, or net80211 can detect beacon miss itself if the driver dispatches received beacon frames through the normal receive path. Software beacon miss support is especially useful when multiple vaps are operating and any hardware beacon miss support just isn't available — like, for example, operating as an access point together with one or more station mode vaps. iykyk 😭

Drivers should dispatch beacon miss events recognized in the driver with ieee80211_beacon_miss(). What does that do? It causes some number of ProbeRequest frames to be sent to the access point to check if the association is still alive fr fr 🫶. If no response is received and roaming mode is set to IEEE80211_ROAMING_AUTO then net80211 will try to re-associate, and if that fails it triggers a scan to look for the access point or another suitable AP. But when the net80211 state machine is being operated manually, e.g. by wpa_supplicant(8), then applications are notified of the state change and are responsible for handling the work of scanning for a new access point — main character energy, they do it themselves 💀. The number of beacon miss events (without a ProbeResponse) is user settable with the IEEE80211_IOC_BMISSTHRESHOLD request ✨.

Software beacon miss detection is enabled per-vap by setting the IEEE80211_FEXT_SWBMISS flag. Typically this is done when a vap is setup and the IEEE80211_CLONE_NOBEACONS option is supplied to the clone operation. But drivers may also force this when they know they need help detecting beacon miss 👑. When beacon miss is detected in software, the event is dispatched without driver involvement — no cap, it just handles itself. And note that software beacon miss handling is not</> limited to station mode; it can be used in any operating mode where beacons from a peer station are received 🌈.

🫶 quick vibe check: this is the station mode beacon miss situation, so keep that in mind before you come for the docs, bestie.

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• wpa_supplicant(8)
• ieee80211(9)
• ieee80211_vap(9)

aaand that's the whole thing, bestie 🎀 tysm for reading — this one came straight out of the Kernel Developer's Manual, shipped by Debian, dated August 4, 2009, so it's giving vintage but make it still slaps 💜🦋✨