Function of hostapd?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 10:30:51AM -0600, Phillip.Watts at nlynx.com wrote:

> I  do NOT have hostapd loaded.  I cannot tell from the
> README what its function is.  Anyone enlighten me?

hostapd is a user space alternative for handling IEEE 802.11 management
functions (like authentication and association) that was originally
performed in the kernel driver. The default configuration is still to
use kernel driver for this; this does not require hostapd at all.
However, hostapd is the future :-).

Nowadays, hostapd includes quite a bit more than only 802.11
authentication and association. It supports IEEE 802.1x authentication
and authorization, RADIUS accounting, parts of IAPP, etc. In addition,
most of the new higher level functionality will be added only to the
user space daemon and using hostapd (i.e., define PRISM2_HOSTAPD for the
driver) will eventually become the default option and I might even
remove the option to cleanup the driver code (i.e., remove all the
authentication and association related functionality from the kernel
driver).

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA