[Buildroot] Realtek-patched hostapd
Peter Korsgaard
peter at korsgaard.com
Thu Sep 7 19:54:13 UTC 2017
>>>>> "Alexander" == Alexander Mukhin <alexander.i.mukhin at gmail.com> writes:
> Dear colleagues,
> let me ask for your advice.
> I'll start with an overview.
> Linux drivers for Realtek wireless chips do not fully implement the
> netlink interface. Because of that, hostapd cannot control them with
> its default netlink driver. There's a patch to hostapd, written
> originally by Realtek, which adds support for their chips. To build a
> patched hostapd in Buildroot, one can add the Realtek patch to the
> custom patches, and build the package in the usual way. This works
> fine, but the resulting binary will still include support for the
> netlink driver and will depend on the netlink library, which is
> superfluous in our circumstances.
What a mess :/ I take it that this is for non-mainlined drivers?
> To get rid of this dependency and build a specifically-targeted
> hostapd binary which supports Realtek chips only, I have to "clone"
> hostapd package and, by editing its Config.in and .mk files, drop
> netlink dependency.
> The question is, should I contribute this Realtek-only version of the
> hostapd package, or dropping the netlink dependency is not a good
> reason for creating one more package?
I would not like to have two hostapd packages in Buildroot.
What is the plan going forward? Is this only a temporary issue and these
drivers are getting mainlined / extended or is it more of a permanent
issue? Are realtek actively maintaining this hostapd patch or do we risk
it getting bitrotten whenever we bump hostapd?
--
Bye, Peter Korsgaard
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