> == Owner == > * Name: [[User:pbrobinson| Peter Robinson]] > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RemoveWirelessExtensions > > == Summary == > The legacy wireless extensions interface was replaced by the new > mac80211/cfg80211 interface in 2007. The legacy Wireless Extensions > support has been long deprecated and only supports long EOL WiFi > encryption like WEP so it's time to disable it and remove it. I do not believe that the assertion around encryption is true, unless wpa_supplicant has dropped support for the legacy interface over the years. I remember having used some legacy wext drivers with wpa_supplicant and WPA (maybe even WPA2) before everything was ported to mac80211 (the "DeviceScape stack" as it was called at the time). And https://w1.fi/wpa_supplicant/ lists not only "Linux drivers that support nl80211/cfg80211 (most new drivers)", but also "Linux drivers that support Linux Wireless Extensions v19 or newer with WPA/WPA2 extensions" as supported. (For the record, I also remember my old Pentium II "notebook" (more like a thick laptop) taking a day or two to build a custom kernel with the DeviceScape/mac80211 stack that was not easily buildable out of tree, in order to build and use the Free-as-in-speech driver for a Broadcom PCMCIA WiFi card, but that is off topic. ;-) ) There were also some drivers implementing WPA on their own, or letting the hardware or firmware do it, in particular, Ralink's GPLed vendor driver. Of course, those nonstandard wext commands were not supported by NetworkManager, so I had to use a custom shell script. The driver was eventually replaced by the rt2x00 community rewrite that relies on wpa_supplicant and that was soon ported to mac80211. But I am pretty sure I also used a wext version of rt2x00 with wpa_supplicant at some point. > The Wireless Extensions support in the kernel has been long replaced > by the mac80211/cfg80211 support. Disable the kernel options and > retire the wireless-tools userspace utilities. Wireless Extensions > only supports a minor subset of the wireless interfaces, predominently > the WEP interface and userspace has been replaced by iw/libnl/ip > interfaces which offer a lot more advanced features as well as modern > 802.11 functionality like WPA. Users are going to miss the iwconfig tool. Not only is it still being used out of habit (just like ifconfig from net-tools), but (also just like ifconfig) it is also much more user-friendly. E.g., running "iwconfig" without arguments prints a nice summary of the wireless devices and their properties, such as access point ESSID and BSSID, bit rate, signal level, etc., whereas running "iw" without arguments prints a 132-line help output with around a hundred different commands (with no explanation as to what they do, as that would require even more than 132 lines: the --help output is 445 lines long). "iw" also exposes implementation details in the most unfriendly way, by requiring the user to use "dev <devname>", "phy <phyname>", "wdev <idx>", or "reg" prefixes depending on the individual command (and it is entirely unclear to the user why something is a dev property, a phy property, or both), whereas "iwconfig" takes the same interface name for all commands. The new ip, iw, and route tools have clearly been designed by kernel developers for kernel developers, not for end users or even system administrators. The old ifconfig and iwconfig are much easier to use. Kevin Kofler _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
