NetworkManager Picks Up Support For Intel's IWD WiFi Daemon & Meson Build System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NetworkManager Picks Up Support For Intel's IWD WiFi Daemon & Meson Build System

NetworkManager now has support for Intel's lean "IWD" WiFi daemon...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NetworkManager-IWD-WiFi

[tildearrow]

Typo:

released as NetworkManaget 1.12 stable.

I wonder whether debianxfce will hate this new daemon and shout "Wicd" again yes he did

[notanoob]

What benefits does Intel's IWD daemon have over something like wpa_supplicant or systemd's network service likend to it? Is it FOSS?

[nwah]

I would love to see Michael do a face-off between ConnMan, NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, and netctl. In terms of performance, connection speed, memory use, etc. And each under different configurations... using IWD and kernel-based TLS vs wpa_supplicant.

[starshipeleven]

What benefits does Intel's IWD daemon have over something like wpa_supplicant or systemd's network service likend to it? Is it FOSS?

it's FOSS, source here https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/netwo...eless/iwd.git/

This presentation/video about it (speech given at systemd.conf) will have all details: https://youtu.be/3uYkW1K0wxo

this is the point of the video where it says why it's better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uYk...tu.be#t=03m50s
in this slide he shows the current situation in Linux wireless connectivity systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uYk...tu.be#t=01m17s
and in this shows the goal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uYk...tu.be#t=03m20s

iwd is supposed to be a linux-only standalone wifi control daemon so they can dump all wifi-specific code they added to ConnMan to workaround the fact that wpa_supplicant sucks. The fact that it is linux-only makes it also faster as it has much less abstraction than wpa_supplicant.

ConnMan is a NetworkManager-like system aimed at embedded devices, it has no GUI per-se but there are a bunch of GUIs for it https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ConnMan

NetworkManager adding support for iwd makes sense for the same reasons.

Overall iwd is a good thing, imho.

[starshipeleven]

unapproved post for notanoob above.

[Sonadow]

The last time it was announced, there was no CLI functionality to connect to a network (open or WPA/WPA2-secured) Is it available now?

I will never use a GUI client to establish a connection to an AP simply because just about every GUI tool always had something broken which made it impossible for me to connect to any of the networks I use, but directly calling wpa_supplicant from the terminal with the appropriate .conf always works, even up till today.

Also, i read that they are dropping WEXT? If go, there goes compatibility with virtually all USB-based 80211ac hardware; every single git repo hosting drivers for these hardware are all using patched versions of vendor drivers that still build against, yes, you guessed it, WEXT.

[Michael_S]

The iwd video at the systemd conference was interesting.

Right now I have a dual boot PC with an Intel AC-7260 wireless PCI-E card. For Windows or Linux, once the PC suspends and resumes the card doesn't work until you completely power the computer off, wait a few seconds, and power it back on. The machine doesn't get heavy use, so I told the family to just power it on to use it and power it off when finished.