[pkg-wpa-devel] Driver autodetection

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 07:40:18PM +1000, Kel Modderman wrote:
> Defaulting to "wext" will prove to be more and more true as time goes 
> on. This will be true for almost all in-kernel modules in the future.

True, this is the long to midterm solution.

> How can we pretend to guess a driver for a interface created by an 
> external-to-kernel module, across many different user configurations 
> (driver version, kernel version etc) with any sort of precision? and 
> also predict what wpa_supplicant driver backend they can use in the 
> future, in the case that a user updates to a newer version of some 
> driver? I'd think this to be a very fragile process until I see some 
> tried and tested code.

I agree to you that we cannot support $RANDOM user compiled kernel
drivers, but as package maintainers, we work on a distribution. The
distribution provides some drivers, so I think this bug is about the
supporting available drivers we currently have.

Hardware detection and activation currently works quite nice on modern
kernels with udev. My proposal is to exploit the infrastructure we
currently already have, and add some hooks to give the wpasupplicant
package hints which driver backend to use.

> My opinion is; its not too hard to add wpa-driver foo to the 
> configuration, so long as documentation is good.

This is the fall back. This bug is because it should not be necessary to
specify wpa-driver. It should work out of the box.

Given that I don't see much need for that, I don't give this bug much of
a priority. I rather outlined how I could image a solution for this, so
that we can finally close this bug.

Gruesse,
	Reinhard