Re: NetworkManager, WPA and non-wext drivers

["Michael T" <raselmsh hotmail com>]

Hello,

Thanks to you and to Darren for your answers.  Can you make an educated 
guess at how much work it is likely to be to change the rtl818x driver to 
use WE-18 (is 18 the right number here?)  I took a very quick look at the 
in-kernel (2.6.18) sources for the ipw2100 driver, and saw two functions (I 
presume they were ioctls, but I didn't even look that long) which looked 
like they were relevant.  If I do happen to find the time this year - I 
don't have it, but I might just still - I could take a look at it myself.  
In that case I would be grateful for any guidance to speed up the job and 
optimise the time spent :)

By the way, as far as I can see, the rtl818x uses a fork of the ipw stack, 
presumably from before the time when it was updated to WE-18.

Regards,

Michael

> From: Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>
> > 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.

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