New driver comming up

[Jouke Witteveen]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 16:46, Jouni Malinen <j at w1.fi> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 03:39:12PM +0200, Jouke Witteveen wrote:
>
>> I am writing a wpa_supplicant driver, specifically for OpenWRT.
>
> What's the need for a new driver interface? Doesn't the driver support
> latest WEXT? If not, could that be added instead of modifying
> wpa_supplicant?

Many routers from Linksys (and others), especially the WRT54G series,
use a Broadcom switch chipset (BCM5325 series). These switch chipsets
are referred to as roboswitches. Being proper switches they block
802.1X packets by default.
The reason why the wired driver does not work is that the procedure of
joining the multicast group (01:80:C2:00:00:03) is completely
different. Furthermore it is only possible to receive EAPOL packets on
a special (not really special, but still) management interface. This
means that it might (I am not sure yet) be necessary to listen on more
than one interface.
Please let me know if it is still thought to be possible to utilize
the 'normal' wired driver in this situation.
>
>> Which files should I edit? As far as I can see the following files are
>> influenced by the upcoming change:
>> src/drivers/driver_roboswitch.c (new)
>> src/drivers/drivers.c
>> wpa_supplicant/Makefile
>> wpa_supplicant/Changelog
>> wpa_supplicant/README
>> wpa_supplicant/defconfig
>> wpa_supplicant/doc/docbook/wpa_supplicant.sgml
>
> That would sound fine.
>
>> wpa_supplicant/config.h
>> wpa_supplicant/config_ssid.h
>> wpa_supplicant/scan.c
>> wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.c
>> wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
>> wpa_supplicant/doc/docbook/wpa_supplicant.conf.sgml
>
> What would you be changing in these? I would not have expected
> driver-specific changes to be needed in these files..

I searched for references to the wired driver. It seemed logical that
all these references should be nuanced to make a distinction between
the wired driver and the roboswitch driver.
>
>> Where to integrate the new driver? Since it is very much related to
>> OpenWRT it sounds reasonable to only have it as a build-patch over
>> there.
>
> If you really need a new driver interface (i.e., driver_wext.c or
> driver_nl80211.c won't do it for some good reason), I can include it in
> the wpa_supplicant distribution, but it would be fine to keep it as an
> OpenWRT patch, too.

The point is that I am not sure this driver will be of any use outside
OpenWRT. That's why I don't know where this driver should go.
>
> --
> Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA
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Regards,
Jouke Witteveen

P.S.
The reason I am not (and cannot be) sending patches/code yet is that I
just started writing and my testing environment is having some
problems at the moment.