From: George Koehler <kernigh@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Purging old 802.11 (wireless) drivers
To: Patrick Harper <mail@paianis.name>
Cc: tech@openbsd.org
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2025 15:20:57 -0400

On Tue, 9 Sep 2025 10:35:32 +0100
Patrick Harper <mail@paianis.name> wrote:

> There are at least four 802.11 drivers for adapters that don't support
> any form of WPA encryption:
> 
> wi(4)
> rtw(4)
> atw(4)
> atu(4)

I have a wi(4) in my macppc Cube G4, and would like to keep the
driver.  It doesn't work with my WPA2 network, but I briefly connected
it to a temporary WEP network.  (WEP is bad, so my WEP network was
effectively unencrypted.)

wi(4) doesn't call the functions in /sys/net80211:
 - wi_ioctl in /sys/dev/ic/if_wi.c implements SIOCS80211NWID and such
   without calling ieee80211_ioctl; and "ifconfig wi0 join" fails
   because it never reaches SIOCS80211JOIN in ieee80211_ioctl.
 - wi_do_hostencrypt does its own WEP without ieee80211_crypto_wep.c

If someone converted wi(4) to use the net80211 functions, it might
gain features like "join" and WPA.  I might try the conversion, but
not soon.  Even if WPA worked, wi(4) would be slow (802.11b but no g),
and I might connect an Ethernet wire sometimes.

The Cube G4 is an old computer from the year 2000.  The internal slot
can only take an Apple Airport wi(4) card.  The Cube has slow USB1, so
a USB2 802.11g adapter would not work well.
--gkoehler