[Buildroot] [PATCH v2] wpa_supplicant: Add NL80211 support option

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Nicolas Cavallari,

On Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:24:28 +0200, Nicolas Cavallari wrote:

> >> +config BR2_PACKAGE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_NL80211
> >> +	bool "Enable NL80211"
> >> +	default y if BR2_PACKAGE_LIBNL
> >> +	select BR2_PACKAGE_LIBNL
> >> +	help
> >> +	  Enable support for NL80211.
> > 
> > In which cases would you want to *not* have NL80211 support if you
> > already have libnl enabled? What is the reason/use-case?
> 
> The author made it clear that it is not the main reason.  The main
> reason is that wpa_supplicant's usefulness is pretty reduced if
> nl80211 is not enabled;
> 
> With a default kernel configuration, only nl80211 is supported since
> the deprecated wext compatibility is disabled by default, so you may
> even end up with a wpa_supplicant binary that can not manage any wifi
> device if you forgot about enabling libnl to have nl80211.
> 
> And wpa_supplicant is not entirely useless without nl80211 either: you
> may want to only use the wired driver to do 802.1x on Ethernet
> networks, or you may only need the wext driver because you are using
> some old/unmaintained out-of-tree linux driver that only knows about wext.
> 
> In either case, it is useful to have an option to enable nl80211, and
> I would even suggest it to be enabled by default (and removing the
> automatic dependency, of course).  I'm quite sure that some features
> which are already optional (such as HS20 or WPS) are useless/dead code
> without nl80211.

Then fair enough: what we need is a patch that adds an option as
suggested by the original author, but also remove the "automatic
optional dependency" handling that is currently in wpa_supplicant.mk.

Would you be willing to work on such a patch?

Thanks for the feedback!

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com