On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 03:48:15PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote: > The difference between normal and important is a matter of opinion, and > that doesn't really factor in what we're going to do about these bug > reports anyway. Important looks good to me. > > (Also, when a submitter considers their bug to be covered by another bug > report, an option would be to close their bug, mentioning that's a > duplicate of another one, or that the other one is more complete, > precise, etc.) > > > To d-i people: adding nl80211 and wifi 7 support to netcfg looks like > > a big task and I guess it is way too late to do it before Trixie > > release. > > ISTR someone asking for help to implement/test that, but I couldn't deal > with that at the time (or now), but I had some vague hopes to look into > it (either assisting or hacking myself) “in the near future”. I'm not > sure how prevalent Wi-Fi 7 is at the moment, but it seems to me this is > definitely something we should tackle, and that might be worth > considering as a backport to Trixie (via point releases) (1) if and when > support has landed and has been tested, and (2) if backporting doesn't > seem crazy (code/packaging change wise, and risk wise).
I get the impression most laptops shipping now are wifi 7. Most machines I have seen in the last year had had it at least. I can certainly test it. I asked a few months ago about how a desired implementation should be done, but got no response from anyone to the question. Given the new interface is netlink based, and there already is libnl in the installer, I don't think it would be a big change package wise, but it would need netcfg to add support for making netlink calls to control wifi 7 devices (and optionally wifi 6 devices I suppose). > > However wouldn't it be desirable to mark wifi 7 controllers as > > unsupported in netcfg and in the installation guide in order to limit > > user frustration ? > > If we can easily spot unsupported cards and not offer them at all > (ignore entirely, with explicit log lines in syslog?) and also document > that in the installation guide, that'd be nice to have. Best if that can > land in 13.0; OK if that lands in 13.n, n>0. (Until support comes along > and is considered for a possible backport as detailed above.) Certainly the current installer behaviour is confusing since the driver loads, then it treats it like a wired port which doesn't work because wifi 7 drivers require using the new interface which netcfg doesn't support. So you see the network device present but it doesn't ask about wifi settings it just tries to do dhcp and fails. -- Len Sorensen
