[Qemu-devel] Virtio based IEEE 802.11 device support

[Ratnaraj Mirgal]

Hi All,

At the outset, I do understand there is no mainstream requirement for
having virtual wireless NIC, if et all there is any, mac80211_hwsim (part
of Linux) is more than sufficient.

So this is purely an academic attempt.

In order to support following topology,

[image: qemu-wifi-topology.png]

I am implementing IEEE 802.11 softmac device based on virtio driver. I
wanted to use existing netdev trasport like socket, however due to lack of
better understanding of internals I have added new netdev (airport), which
is very similar to VDE transport implementation. On frontend side, I have
combined virtio-net and mac80211_hwsim to form frontend wireless driver.

As of now all driver are loading, and further working on correcting queue
implementation.

00:03.0 Network controller [0280]: Red Hat, Inc Device [1af4:100a]
        Subsystem: Red Hat, Inc Device [1af4:000a]
        Kernel driver in use: virtio-pci

# lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by    Tainted: G
arc4                   16384  2
virtio_mac80211        24576  0
mac80211              356352  1 virtio_mac80211
sha256_generic         24576  0
cfg80211              221184  1 mac80211

4: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group
default qlen 1000
    link/ether 52:55:00:d1:55:01 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff


I have kept the repository at,
https://github.com/ra7narajm/virtio-mac80211

So if possible, do go through and let me know any mistakes.

Thank You.

-
Ratnaraj