Re: Support for Android for mac80211 / cfg80211 802.11 drivers

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 09:02:52AM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 21:41 -0500, Bob Copeland wrote:
> > From the wiki:
> > 
> > "The proper approach would be to provide a custom driver_nl80211_android.c
> > wrapper for the modified wpa_supplicant in Android."
> > 
> > I just don't think it's strictly necessary to ship a modified wpa_s.
> > Why is Android special when bog standard Linux gets by ok with
> > driver_nl80211?
> 
> Agree, that is a dumb idea. What's that driver going to do? Use custom
> nl80211 extensions?! That way lies insanity.

The only reason for that is to be able to support the wpa_supplicant
modifications used in Android that are not acceptable for upstream
hostap.git (mainly, driver_cmd). This would not add any custom nl80211
extensions; the needed functionality should be added properly to
upstream nl80211.

If it is fine to remove the custom wpa_supplicant modifications from
Android, this is obviously a moot point, but until that happens, the
easiest approach seems to be to provide a custom driver_*.c based on
nl80211 to isolate the custom changes to user space and to small part of
it at that. I don't really want to see new drivers trying to provide
WEXT support with private ioctls to address need for making it work with
Android..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA
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