Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable"

Arend van Spriel
2014-12-31T15:02:30Z

On 12/31/14 15:07, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Dec 2014, Arend van Spriel wrote:
>
>> The thing with WEXT is that it will stay as is. So if tools like wicd
>> want to support new features like P2P it will need to make the switch. I
>> checked out wicd repo and found a number of iwconfig calls and they kick
>> off wpa_supplicant with wext driver.
>
> Unfortunately this is by no means just about wicd. I have already received
> a few off-list mails from people who were wondering why their home-made
> scripts / tools, which are running 'iwconfig' directly suddenly stopped to
> work, and that it was indeed fallout of WEXT going away. Given the very
> short time this has been in mainline, you can probably imagine the
> fireworks once this appears in major release.

It is unfortunately indeed. I think iwconfig and friends will never go
away although iw is a better alternative, simply because people don't
like to change their home-made scripts/tools. WIRELESS_EXT actually is
largely, but not entirely, gone in upstream drivers and what we are
talking about here is CFG80211_WEXT which allows WEXT userspace to
interact with cfg80211-based drivers through a compatibility layer.

Regards,
Arend