[DESIGN RFC v3] AP Architecture for Wi-Fi-8 Multi-AP Coordination (MAPC)

[Johannes Berg]

On Mon, 2026-01-12 at 20:12 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> 
> Why do you always want to let firmware be in control of everything?
> Seems at least for some of this you'd really want the upper layers to
> control it for purposes of coordination? How does the FW even know which
> other AP it can coordinate with, isn't that something a network
> controller would determine?

A less generous reading of this could be: you guys want everything to be
controlled by FW, so you don't have to open-source it in hostapd. Now
you realize oops, don't really want to do all the security handshake in
FW, so we need to ask hostapd and then we need keys and stations and all
this stuff. So let's build something nobody else can use, upstream it
and we get the best of both worlds - others will maintain the mac80211
code for us anyway.

Am I wrong? Is there a technical reason for not simply doing MAPC
discovery/agreement negotiation etc. in hostapd as well, based on
driver/hw/fw capabilities, and then you don't need all these strange
"triggered by firmware" flows?

johannes