mac80211 requires to see many management frames for proper operation, and users may want to see many more frames when in monitor mode. However, for best CPU usage and power consumption, having as few frames as possible percolate through the stack is desirable. Hence, the hardware should filter as much as possible.

To achieve this, mac80211 uses filter flags (see below) to tell the driver's configure_filter function which frames should be passed to mac80211 and which should be filtered out.

Before configure_filter is invoked, the prepare_multicast callback is invoked with the parameters mc_count and mc_list for the combined multicast address list of all virtual interfaces. It's use is optional, and it returns a u64 that is passed to configure_filter. Additionally, configure_filter has the arguments changed_flags telling which flags were changed and total_flags with the new flag states.

If your device has no multicast address filters your driver will need to check both the FIF_ALLMULTI flag and the mc_count parameter to see whether multicast frames should be accepted or dropped.

All unsupported flags in total_flags must be cleared. Hardware does not support a flag if it is incapable of _passing_ the frame to the stack. Otherwise the driver must ignore the flag, but not clear it. You must _only_ clear the flag (announce no support for the flag to mac80211) if you are not able to pass the packet type to the stack (so the hardware always filters it). So for example, you should clear FIF_CONTROL, if your hardware always filters control frames. If your hardware always passes control frames to the kernel and is incapable of filtering them, you do _not_ clear the FIF_CONTROL flag. This rule applies to all other FIF flags as well.