On Fri, Feb 07, 2025 at 09:55:32AM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > So if I run iwconfig from wireless-tools (which provides the libiw that > netcfg uses for wireless) I get: > > lo: no wireless extensions > > wlp9s0f0 no wireless extensions > > So it seems wireless-tools is entirely designed for wireless extentions, > while iw and a numbet of other wifi config tools are able to use the > nl80211 interface and hence work. > > 'iw list' provides lots of output for the interface. > > I wonder if any nl80211 compatible library even exists that netcfg > could use. Certainly the function being called by netcfg to detected a > device is wireless will not work at all on a driver that only supports > nl80211, so the current behaviour is making sense. Perhaps since the > new interface is netlink based, it is assumed you can just do it directly > and don't need a library to wrap around things like libiw was doing.
I see in the kernel that cfg80211 was introduced in 2007. And it has the wext compatibility wrapper that has been in use for years. Unfortunately any new device that supports MLO is not allowed to use the wext compatibility interface since it apparently can't work. So supporting any new wifi interface requires updating to the "new" interface. -- Len Sorensen
