[pkg-wpa-devel] Removal Of IPW Driver

[Kel Modderman]

On Tuesday 29 April 2008 23:00:12 Will Daniels wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Hope I'm mailing this to the right place, sorry if it's not :)
> 
> I was just looking at the Debian Changelog for the wpasupplicant package 
> and noticed this entry for 0.6.1~git20071119-1:
> 
> * No longer build "ndiswrapper" or "ipw" backends. Etch shipped with a
> kernel in which neither of these backends could work (> Linux 2.6.14) so
> it is about time we no longer pretended to support for them.
> 
> Even though the Intel IPW drivers support WPA through WEXT now, there is 
> at least one other driver that I know of, r8180 (Realtek) which was 
> originally based on the IPW driver code (before WEXT-18 extensions) and 
> so supports WPA using the IPW backend in wpa_supplicant, but not yet via 
> WEXT.  So, the ipw backend really needs to stay there or at least be 
> made available as a separate package or something.

The linux kernel drivers supporting realtek wireless lan chipsets (rtl8180,
rtl8187) that are in active development are mac80211 based. I think
you may be referring to a driver that is no longer maintained[0] which forked
a very early version of the Intel ieee80211 stack and is very likely to be
buggy and only get more buggy as it bitrots. In my opinion, if the
wpasupplicant package advertised support for this driver it would be
doing a disservice to its users.

rtl8180 first appeared in Linux 2.6.25, so it is very new. 

[0] http://rtl8180-sa2400.sourceforge.net/

> 
> The comment about neither the ipw nor ndiswrapper backends being able to 
> work in kernels above 2.6.14 has me a little confused, since I'm 
> currently using the ipw backend in Ubuntu Hardy with kernel 2.6.24 
> (wpa_supplicant v0.5.8)...

ndiswrapper didn't expose it's private ioctl's to any kernel version past
2.6.14 or 2.6.15, and they were later removed. Jouni Malinen and I have
discussed why driver_ndiswrapper.c still exists and that discussion is on
public record[1].

[1] http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2007-November/016566.html

Below is an extract from src/drivers/driver_ipw.c[2] file from wpa_supplicant
sources:

* Please note that ipw2100/2200 drivers change to use generic Linux wireless
 * extensions if the kernel includes support for WE-18 or newer (Linux 2.6.13
 * or newer). driver_wext.c should be used in those cases.

[2] http://w1.fi/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=hostap.git;a=blob;f=src/drivers/driver_ipw.c;hb=HEAD

Kel.