Porting hostapd and wpa_supplicant to a new driver

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 09:26:17AM +0100, Dan Searle wrote:

> I'm very impressed with the code for the hostapd and wpa_supplicant, and
> given the excellent developer documentation, doesn't seem too hard to port
> either the Phillips driver, or the hostapd/wpa_supplicant to work with each
> other, i.e. make modifications to make them meet in the middle somewhere.
> 
> My question is, has anyone had much experience making drivers (other than
> hostap) work with the hostapd and wpa_supplicant before? Are there any notes
> anyone has about porting? Any pitfalls, caveats to watch out for? Oh, and
> for the record, the Phillips driver doesn't use the traditional Linux
> wireless extensions API, it has it's own set of user space utility programs
> for changing settings on the radio interfaces, would this create problems
> with porting the code?

hostapd is not yet quite ready for this, but it is moving to that
direction and will hopefully be easier to use with other drivers in the
future. This is ongoing work, so any comments and/or patches on this
area are welcome.

wpa_supplicant was designed from the beginning to support multiple
drivers. It has already been used successfully with ten or so drivers. I
have used it with a driver that does not use Linux wireless extensions
at all, so that is not a problem either. I have tried to write enough
documentation for wpa_supplicant porting (developer.txt and documented
driver interface in driver.h). If this leaves something unclear, please
send more detailed question(s) and I'll add some more documentation.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA