From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:29:47 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] [PATCH v2] wpa_supplicant: Add NL80211 support option In-Reply-To: <55A383CC.8030809@green-communications.fr> References: <1407514672-6231-1-git-send-email-jtheou@adeneo-embedded.us> <20150712192552.23e76408@free-electrons.com> <55A383CC.8030809@green-communications.fr> Message-ID: <20150713112947.7e14fd64@free-electrons.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net 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