About hostap memory usage

[Rissanen, Jukka]

Hi,

I am writing this on behalf of Zephyr RTOS wifi community. We are using hostap 2.11 which is integrated to Zephyr RTOS and used as a native wifi stack. We noticed that the upgrade to v2.11 increased memory consumption and one of the reasons was Wi-Fi 7 support which is always enabled in STA mode but can be turned off in AP mode (CONFIG_IEEE80211BE option). This memory consumption is problematic in embedded devices which have limited RAM and flash available. Zephyr RTOS is made to be highly configurable and modular in order to allow user to select bits and pieces that he/she needs. So even if the user does not need Wi-Fi 7 support in STA mode, it cannot be turned off.

So our question is, if upstream would be willing to accept patches that make Wi-Fi 7 optional in STA mode?

Related to this, would it be possible to take into account the memory consumption growth for the new features? Generally, compiler is able to do a good job at dropping unused code. However, they are not able to drop unused fields in the structures. So, it would be great if the fields introduced with new features could be conditionally compiled. So that even if new hostap versions emerge, end users could upgrade to use the latest version and not expect the memory consumption to increase as the not needed features could be turned off but users could still benefit from security fixes etc.

Cheers,
Jukka