Re: NetworkManager, WPA and non-wext drivers

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 09:41 +0100, Michael T wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I hope that I am not repeating a too-often asked question - I tried googling 
> the lists, but didn't find it.  I would like to ask what the plans are for 
> supporting WPA with chipsets for which there is no wireless extensions 
> driver available.  Currently, things definitely do not Just Work for other 
> chipsets.  I do not think that it would be a major problem, since I suspect 
> that you have already done the hard work.

There are no plans to do this.  Either the drivers start support _ONE_
configuration interface, or they will not Just Work.  It's not really
that hard; please press your driver writers to support WEXT, and if they
have any questions, tell them to ask on netdev where plenty of people
will help (me being one of them).  I've already done the WEXT
conversions for airo, atmel, prism54, and helped in a small way with
madwifi and rtl2x00.

Distros may patch NM, but upstream NM won't condone using any
configuration interface other than WEXT.  NM will eventually move to
support cfg80211 when that comes around, but by that time anyway most of
the work will be done by wpa_supplicant.

Dan

> I was able to get NetworkManger to connect to my WPA network by:
> 
> * adding a couple of lines to src/nm-device-802-11-wireless.c to make it use 
> wpa_supplicant's ipw driver instead of wext if the card contains an rtl8180 
> chipset (as mine does)

This is clearly broken, since the ipw* drivers don't use the ipw
wpa_supplicant driver any more, and haven't for about a year.

> * connecting to the network by manually entering all network and encryption 
> details using the KNetworkManager GUI, since the GUI still picked up the 
> network as WEP
> 
> I'm not sure about the issue of the network still being detected as WEP - in 
> fact I'm not even sure if it is an issue with NetworkManager or the KDE GUI 
> - but at least adding as much support as I did for known chipsets would be - 
> or at least ought to be, although there are probably other issues - a 
> relatively trivial matter, and at the moment, restricting most chipsets to 
> WEP encryption really is a serious limitation.
> 
> I did read a discussion of this on a Debian mailing list.  The outcome was 
> that all drivers ought to use wireless extensions for WPA, so the drivers 
> should be fixed instead.  I do think though that fixing the drivers is not 
> very likely in the near future, and so that solution will not help users who 
> want things to Just Work.
> 
> It would be nice if you could CC me any answers, since I am not subscribed 
> to the mailing list.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Michael
> 
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