[Buildroot] Realtek-patched hostapd

[Peter Korsgaard <peter@korsgaard.com>]

>>>>> "Alexander" == Alexander Mukhin <alexander.i.mukhin@gmail.com> writes:

 > Dear colleagues,
 > let me ask for your advice.

 > I'll start with an overview.

 > Linux drivers for Realtek wireless chips do not fully implement the
 > netlink interface. Because of that, hostapd cannot control them with
 > its default netlink driver. There's a patch to hostapd, written
 > originally by Realtek, which adds support for their chips. To build a
 > patched hostapd in Buildroot, one can add the Realtek patch to the
 > custom patches, and build the package in the usual way. This works
 > fine, but the resulting binary will still include support for the
 > netlink driver and will depend on the netlink library, which is
 > superfluous in our circumstances.

What a mess :/ I take it that this is for non-mainlined drivers?

 > To get rid of this dependency and build a specifically-targeted
 > hostapd binary which supports Realtek chips only, I have to "clone"
 > hostapd package and, by editing its Config.in and .mk files, drop
 > netlink dependency.

 > The question is, should I contribute this Realtek-only version of the
 > hostapd package, or dropping the netlink dependency is not a good
 > reason for creating one more package?

I would not like to have two hostapd packages in Buildroot.

What is the plan going forward? Is this only a temporary issue and these
drivers are getting mainlined / extended or is it more of a permanent
issue? Are realtek actively maintaining this hostapd patch or do we risk
it getting bitrotten whenever we bump hostapd?

-- 
Bye, Peter Korsgaard