Re: NetworkManager, WPA and non-wext drivers

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 17:00 +0100, Michael T wrote:
> 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.

Wow, that code hasn't been touched in a year or more.  It certainly
needs a maintainer who cares about it or it's not going to get
_anywhere_.  And without a maintainer it's not going to get the
attention it needs to get upstream.  I'd say your chances of getting
this fixed are pretty close to nil unless a white knight comes along and
picks it up.

Dan

> 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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