Subject: Re: wlan#ap seems bogus

From: Johannes Berg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:22:54 +0200

Simon Barber wrote:
> The purpose of the wlap0ap or wlap0mgmt interface is to communicate
> between hostapd/wpa_supplicant and the kernel. What travels over this
> interface is not quite pure 802.11 management frames - there is some
> meta-data with each frame, and a few special case messages. E.G.
> transmitted frames are returned back to user space to indicate
> successful transmission (required so that the MLME state machine can be
> correctly implemented in user space). I believe these messages form a
> special management protocol between the kernel and user space, and that
> netlink would be the best solution for this link. Switching to netlink
> would allow these bogus 'network' interfaces to be removed alltogether.
> Unfortunately I don't currently have the time to put together a patch to
> do this.
>   
Ok, I'll try to remember that this is waiting on defining a complete new 
netlink API. I was just reading the code and this seemed odd, but I 
agree that no network interface is really needed and hence it can stay 
like this until we switch to a new API unifying it.

Thanks,
johannes