Dual band

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 09:19:39PM +0100, Fejes József wrote:
> However, the following still stands: it would be nice if hostapd could
> create and destroy virtual interfaces on demand. It would be somewhat
> similar that I don't have to put the card into AP mode with the iw
> command, hostapd does it for me, and I could create virtual interfaces
> with iw but hostapd could do that too. Then I could run one instance
> of hostapd with two configs, and both configs could reference the same
> physical interface. It's nicer than setting up the virtual interfaces
> by hand and ensuring it happens before hostapd starts.

You can already do that.. hostapd supports multiple BSSs on the same
interface and can add those virtual interfaces on demand. This can be
done either using a single hostapd.conf file (see bss=<ifname> in the
end of hostapd/hostapd.conf) or using separate configuration files for
each virtual interface and loading the interfaces either from command
line with the -b parameter (1) or using the control interface ADD/REMOVE
bss_config commands to add/remove virtual interfaces dynamically (2).

That said, this is still for a single-channel use case, not for handling
virtual interfaces on different channels from some hypothetical single
"radio" device with a driver that shows up as a single wiphy but
actually has multiple PHYs and MACs internally to support such
multichannel operations.


(1)
https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=5afaa067d93b4b68cb64a092069c31d81fa44077

(2)
https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=2e2fff37e9840c42d78f172ab1adc9e3b2bac351
https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/commit/?id=5592065850a40e235020dba79e5592b949b829b8

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA