Re: Support for Android for mac80211 / cfg80211 802.11 drivers

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Wed, 2011-02-02 at 13:30 +0200, Jouni Malinen wrote:

> > Agree, that is a dumb idea. What's that driver going to do? Use custom
> > nl80211 extensions?! That way lies insanity.
> 
> The only reason for that is to be able to support the wpa_supplicant
> modifications used in Android that are not acceptable for upstream
> hostap.git (mainly, driver_cmd). This would not add any custom nl80211
> extensions; the needed functionality should be added properly to
> upstream nl80211.

What's the driver_cmd things they use? If we they add support for
whatever it is to nl80211, why can those not be normal supplicant
interfaces?

> If it is fine to remove the custom wpa_supplicant modifications from
> Android, this is obviously a moot point, but until that happens, the
> easiest approach seems to be to provide a custom driver_*.c based on
> nl80211 to isolate the custom changes to user space and to small part of
> it at that. I don't really want to see new drivers trying to provide
> WEXT support with private ioctls to address need for making it work with
> Android..

Indeed -- no way. Seems Android needs to learn upstream.

johannes