What is the plan for getting hostap into the kernel

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 12:14:18PM +0000, David Goodenough wrote:

> Hostap seems to be settling down nicely and is now in use in production
> in a good number of places, but obviously it still has to be downloaded 
> and built separately from the kernel.  Is there any plan to get it into
> 2.6 (now that 2.6 is also settling down)?

Well, in theory I would be ready for trying to get it into the kernel
distribution, but there is no concrete plan for this. The last time this
was tried, there were some questions about whether it would be OK to
include a new driver that uses its own encryption routines and not
crypto API that has been added to Linux 2.6. This has actually moved to
somewhat worse direction because I have actually added couple of new
algorithms to the Host AP crypto code.

The decision to use own routines was done before crypto API was added
to Linux kernel and the current crypto API does not seem to provide
enough functionality for IEEE 802.11 (stream ciphers). I don't have
anything against converting Host AP to use crypto API, but it does not
look like anyone is really working on extending crypto API to support
this kind of use case. Unfortunately, I'm quite busy with just core IEEE
802.11 things, so it may take quite long before I can allocate enough
time to work on the crypto API internals.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA