From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Peter Korsgaard Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2017 21:54:13 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] Realtek-patched hostapd In-Reply-To: (Alexander Mukhin's message of "Mon, 4 Sep 2017 20:11:07 +0300") References: Message-ID: <877exab7yy.fsf@dell.be.48ers.dk> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net >>>>> "Alexander" == Alexander Mukhin 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