[pkg-wpa-devel] Driver autodetection

[kelrin at tpg.com.au]

Quoting Reinhard Tartler <siretart at tauware.de>:

> 
> 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.
> 

I have given this topic some thought, and can submit a *very simple*
driver guessing patch for the ifupdown script sometime this evening.
When IF_WPA_DRIVER (wpa-driver) is not given, we can look for
/proc/<driver_knob>/$IFACE for ndiswrapper/madwifi (maybe hostap but the
/proc knobs for it are not updated in the case of interface renaming
currently) and others. This sort of thing is common in some other
distributions networking scripts. Also, while I am at it, I will satisfy
one of the TODO items by selecting driver "wired" for non-wireless devices.

This would have the advantage of being valid for older systems
(non-udev, 2.4 kernels), and the user can always override by specifying
IF_WPA_DRIVER, which we should *always* suggest to do so in our
documentation.

If we have this, I'd like to remove the [ -e
/etc/wpa_supplicant/driver.$IFACE ] stuff also.

Would that kind of scheme satisfy the reporter of this bug?

Thanks, Kel.