[arch-general] Wireless userspace tools

[Thomas Bächler]

Sujith schrieb:
> The new tool to interface with mac80211 based wireless drivers is 'iw' [1].
> It was started because WEXT (Wireless Extionsions) will be deprecated [2] and 'iw'
> will be the single tool to configure/manage wireless devices in linux.
> 
> Currently, I see a PKGBUILD in AUR that is outdated and pointing to the wrong source
> as well. Though it is currently under heavy development [3] and doesn't implement all the
> commands that iwconfig supports, iw is where future development will be focused on.
> I think iw should be part of the core wireless tools in arch.

I am actually keeping track of wireless development. iw's functionality 
is quite limited right now and the wext-based wireless_tools are the way 
to go for now. I will however bring iw to extra and to core later when 
it supports more functions.

Also, I'm surprised that wpa_supplicant still uses wext instead of 
cfg80211. I think that might change in the 0.6 series.

> Also, the new regulatory framework for wireless devices is CRDA, initial patches have
> already been merged into wireless-testing and the only way to choose a regulatory domain
> from userspace is using 'iw'. Which reminds me, CRDA has to be packaged too. Briefly,
> CRDA is a userspace database of regulatory domains and is invoked by the kernel as and when
> needed using udev. Development of CRDA happens on wireless.kernel.org. [4]

CRDA won't be needed until 2.6.28 or 2.6.29. The upcoming 2.6.27 still 
contains the old regulatory code, and as long as we don't have 
compat-wireless, we don't need CRDA. I will add this daemon when I start 
playing with the new regulatory framework.

I am glad they finally do something sane about regulation. When I first 
started using iwl3945, all 802.11a channels were blocked for me. This is 
now fixed by setting the "EU" regulatory domain, but the possibilities 
of having static tables in the kernel are still too limited.

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