wpa_supplicant cannot authenticate connection on prism2 radios if interface names do not match

[Thomas Richter]

Hi folks,

sorry to ask again, probably the issue got lost over the weekend. I
reported yesterday the following weird problem for wpa_supplicant
failing on prism2 wireless cards under some conditions related to udev.

Typically, the prism2 driver creates paired devices, wifi0 (raw radio,
as I understand it) and wlan0 (the established connection). For reasons
unclear to me, wpa_supplicant seems to depend matched names, i.e. if
wlanX is there, and it is a hostap (prism2) managed device, it also
expects wifiX there, with the same X.

Now, it happens at points that udev jumps into play and renames the wlan
interface, without touching the wifi device. If that happens,
wpa_supplicant just fails, apparently trying to rfkill the wifi device
for reasons unclear to me, and then fails to establish the connection.

The precise conditions are as follows:

This is an oldish IBM R31 laptop with a debian wheezy on it, but with a
custom vanilla 3.18.7 kernel. (The debian kernel is too old to work on
this machine, due to a bug in the i830GM graphics support unrelated to
this issue).

The laptop came originally with a ipw2200 wifi installed, which udev
assigned to the interface name wlan0. Unfortunately, the ipw2200 driver
has a couple of problems of its own, as in randomly crashing the system
when sending out packets, so the ipw2200 wifi was replaced by a prism2
based mini-PCI card.

Now, udev tries to remember device names, and finds that wlan0 is
already taken for the ipw2200 no longer in the system, so it renames the
wlan0 of the hostap/prism card to wlan1.

If I now list network interfaces with ifconfig,I see "wifi0", and
"wlan1", both handled by the prism driver.

Unfortunately, in this combination, wpa_supplicant fails over and cannot
authenticate the connection.

If I edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and remove the fixed
network names, i.e. the reserved entry for ipw2200, then everything
works fine. In this combination, hostap/prism gets the interfaces wlan0
and wifi0, and wpa_supplicant accepts this just fine.

Thus, please: What is the matter here? Could you please fix this?

Thanks,
	Thomas