Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:02:24 +0100 | From | Arend van Spriel <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable" |
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On 12/31/14 15:07, Jiri Kosina wrote: > On Wed, 31 Dec 2014, Arend van Spriel wrote: > >> The thing with WEXT is that it will stay as is. So if tools like wicd >> want to support new features like P2P it will need to make the switch. I >> checked out wicd repo and found a number of iwconfig calls and they kick >> off wpa_supplicant with wext driver. > > Unfortunately this is by no means just about wicd. I have already received > a few off-list mails from people who were wondering why their home-made > scripts / tools, which are running 'iwconfig' directly suddenly stopped to > work, and that it was indeed fallout of WEXT going away. Given the very > short time this has been in mainline, you can probably imagine the > fireworks once this appears in major release.
It is unfortunately indeed. I think iwconfig and friends will never go away although iw is a better alternative, simply because people don't like to change their home-made scripts/tools. WIRELESS_EXT actually is largely, but not entirely, gone in upstream drivers and what we are talking about here is CFG80211_WEXT which allows WEXT userspace to interact with cfg80211-based drivers through a compatibility layer.
Regards, Arend
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