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Topic: b43 and multi ssid/vap?

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Hi all,

I currently have a WRT54GS v1 running kamikaze 7.09, solely as an access point with two SSIDs on separate VLANs. This works great. I'd like to use the WRT as a gateway however the 2.4 port forwarding bug is a problem. Upgrading to bleeding edge brcm-2.4 is no good for me as the chip is a corerev 7, so no multi-ssid in new releases.

I'm considering picking up a WRT54GL v1.1 and runing kamikaze SVN bcm47xx on it so I don't get the port forwarding problems but before I do - does multi-ssid or VAP work with the b43 driver? I'd hate to lose multi-ssid just to resolve the port forwarding issue.

Cheers
Speedster

Multi-SSID, WDS and WEP isn't working with b43 driver yet, IIRC.

In latest trunk I was not even able to get b43 in AP mode sad

So, the b43 driver still needs a lot of work...

(Last edited by Yanira on 8 Oct 2008, 10:29)

According to kernelnewbies.org, 2.6.27 kernel made b43 gain meshed networking support (WDS, I guess... well, it seems WDS support has just been committed in mainline mac80211 with 2.6.26)...

... as for multi-SSID, which interests me a real lot too, it seems people like Johannes Berg have come up with patches to make multi-MAC (which doesn't necesserally imply multi-SSID... but which is a good start, to get multi-BSSID, and not just multi-ESSID) work with b43... but I have not seen those in kernel changelogs though...

And it does not seem to work yet with the 2.6.25 kernel shipped with current SVN, working with b43 (although last night one, ie 12993, made WPA2/PSK work for me in AP mode, though there is a problem with the WLAN led... which I guess is not so surprising, as led triggers seems to only have been implemented for b43-legacy, in 2.6.25)...

Let us just be patient smile All of this is still in its very young age...

If of any interest, linuxwireless.org mentions that  multi-bssid is amongst things that are (possibly) needed in order to accomplish 802.11 compliance.

They suggest that this is now more of a hostapd problem than a kernel one (though Johannes Berg work on patches seems to imply firmware modification, I guess, as it is possible with broadcom's blob, the firmware we now have should be able to do it)...

As OpenWRT embeds the last development version of hostapd, we should now wait for an upcoming version of this one that may be able to keep track of BSSes, as they say (assuming b43/mac80211 is yet able to manage this)...

I have personnally tried to add an interface to wlan0 using "iw dev wlan0 add interface wlan0_0 type monitor", and then relaunch hostapd with an updated config file that took other bss in account (see this page), but with no success, hostapd dying without telling anything, including when I specified the "-d" debug switch... it also seems one may use several SSID inside one BSSID, but this time hostapd told me it did not knew about the "multi_ssid" option...

Well, we'll see in the future.

(Last edited by Aefron on 18 Oct 2008, 17:20)

What is the current status of AP and WDS support for b43 on Kamikaze 8.09 RC1?

Still not implemented...

Please make noise that you want iw updated and hostapd updated in trunk, new releases exist that are not yet in openwrt.  Patches have been submitted for iw https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/4373  hostapd 0.6.7 update is also a small change

Is support for multi ssid lacking from hostapd or from b43?

Jake:

Hostapd supports multiple SSIDs. b43 does not currently support it.

There are two things required for this from b43: first, wl.o compiled with multiple BSSID support. Currently, the firmware in b43 is only compiled with single bssid support; second, the current b43 driver needs API extensions to call the second BSSID and configure it. This work has not been done and we don't have the necessary information for the firmware driver API for wl.o.

marc.

(Last edited by marca56 on 8 Apr 2009, 00:51)

It does not and will not, if me Google-fu works :-). It is possible to compile images with proprietary wl drivers.

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