State of Wi-Fi on Linux

iwd[permalink] A few months ago, a pile of security issues were found in the kernel’s AF_ALG implementation, and it now seems to be on its way to deprecation. iwd, the mature, working Wi-Fi implementation on Linux relies on AF_ALG extensively. It’s also somewhat unmaintained, so it’s unclear if it’ll be updated or simply die — its dependency is quite foundational, so it’s not a trivial fix either. iwd is also really well positioned in terms of UIs, with a few pretty okay ones available (in TUI or GUI forms). wpa_supplicant[permalink] With iwd’s future being uncertain, I’ve been experimenting with the other major implementation: wpa_supplicant. Setting it up was a bit under-documented, and I had to patch its service file so it runs as a dedicated user (with capabilities="^cap_net_raw,^cap_net_admin") instead of as root (with infinite permissions). It’s unclear to me why it even ran as root: I suspect some edge case requires this, but I can’t find which one. It also runs as root on…

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