[systemd-devel] systemd-networkd vs. iwd

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mo, 26.10.20 13:04, Bruce A. Johnson (bjohnson at blueridgenetworks.com) wrote:

> What are the state of things and the plan for the future with respect to
> iwd and systemd-networkd? A couple of years ago, I put together a
> satisfactory solution for my project in OpenEmbedded/Yocto using
> systemd-networkd to manage the IP connections and wpa_supplicant to
> manage the underlying Wi-Fi connection. Now it seems that Yocto has
> dropped wpa_supplicant in favor of iwd, and the iwd folks seem to want
> it to manage DHCP and routing in addition to the basic Level 2
> connectivity. It also seems like systemd-networkd can still do the stuff
> it was doing before and that I can just use iwd to manage the Level 2.
> Am I going to write myself into another dead end if I keep using
> systemd-networkd for the network management and only use iwd for Level 2?

Wifi can embed some DHCP info inside the wifi headers of packets
already, to improve activation speed. That#s why the iwd people want
to do DHCP themselves.

This doesn't really make too much sense to me this way though, given
the DHCP lease data is thus not seen/used by networkd (and it uses it
for a lot of other stuff).

In an ideal world networkd would understand enough wifi to do the
magic dhcp stuff they do, so that networkd still processes the DHCP
leases (and also can generate DHCP leases the way wifi likes it if the
DHCP server logic is used). But so far noone worked on this, and not
sure how this would related to iwd.

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering, Berlin