Host AP and hostapd interaction

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sun, Feb 18, 2007 at 04:12:42PM +0100, simone grassilli wrote:

> I'm working with the Host AP driver, hostapd and
> wpa_supplicant.

> I'd like to know, if possibile, when association
> requests arrive in the server side, what happens?
> 1) requests are captured by the Host AP driver first
> and then it sends them to the hostapd daemon which
> satisfies the request and then sends a response to the
> Host AP driver, which at the end sends a response to
> client;
> 2) requests are captured by the hostapd daemon first
> and then it satisfies the request by using the Host AP
> driver, and then hostapd sends a response to client;
> in this case the Host AP driver never interacts
> directly with the client;

2) is closer. When hostapd is used, association request is processed in
hostapd, not in the driver. In other words, the driver is only used to
deliver packets and it does not process the frames in either direction
apart from just taking care of transmitting/receiving them.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA