A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant

In addition to the BUS1 presentation, also exciting from the systemd.conf 2016 conference is a thorough walkthrough of a new wireless daemon for Linux being developed by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center.

Intel has been developing a new wireless daemon for Linux to potentially replace wpa_supplicant. This new daemon isn't yet public but the code repositories for it will be opened up in the next few weeks. This new daemon has improvements around persistency, WiFi management, reduced abstractions for different operating systems and legacy interfaces, and changes to operation. This daemon is designed to be very lightweight and work well for embedded Linux use-cases especially, including IoT applications.

So far this new daemon supports open WiFi, WPA / WPA2 Personal WiFI, WPS, EAP-TLS and EPA-TTLS Enterprise WiFi, EAP engine and EAPoL, persistent storage, and a D-Bus API. It also provides a tracing utility and a testing framework/tools. Still to be done is a proper CLI client, connection manager integration (e.g. ConnMan / NetworkManager / systemd-networkd), roaming / access point steering, offload support, and other features.

Those into Linux networking that want to learn more about this forthcoming daemon, the conference video is embedded below.