I'm fairly new to OpenWrt and at the moment I'm trying to understand how wl, wifi and nas interact with each other and what there role is.
I read thru the documentation but that was not sufficient to get a complete overview of there interaction.

Ok here's my understanding so far:
All three applications are user level processes that are somehow needed to provide wifi functionality.

wl is used to configure the wireless driver. This done via the kernel module wlcompat. wl sets internal register in the wifi device and also reads and writes nvram settings. (Does the wifi device have persistent storage i.e. flash or do all settings need to be stored outside of the wifi device?).

wifi has a similar role than wl but also runs as a background process to provide an unkown service(What is actually done in the background?). wifi also interfaces to the wlcompat kernel module to access the actual hardware.

nas is a user level background process that is somehow responsible for providing wifi encryption. Data received by the wifi device is passed to nas via wlcompat then decrypted and then passed back into the kernel where it is delivered to the network device.

All the above is based on my basic understanding and my assumptions are probably not completely true. So please add or correct my descriptions.

wl.o is a kernel module

wl is a userspace configuration utility for wl.o, using a proprietary protocol

iwconfig is the standard wireless configuration utlity, incompatible with wl.o

wlcompat.o intercepts iwconfig requests and translates them for wl.o, allowing iwconfig to (almost) work.

wifi is userspace utility to read nvram data and configure the wireless (non interactive), it will remain in the background to make sure the wireless driver actually does it (buggy driver). It uses the same protocol as iwconfig so the utility can be used with other wireless drivers.

nas a userspace utility for wpa/wpa2/radius authentication (the wpa client/supplicant is built into wl.o) it does not use wlcompat

You mean the protocol between wl and wl.o?

OK, so nas does not handle the encryption itself but only the authentication of the keys? Where does the actual encryption take place? In wl.o or on the device? Or is this device/configuration dependant, because wl lets you configure if encryption should be handled in hardware or in software?

If the choices for where encryption takes place are only the wifi device or wl.o, isn't this topic(http://wiki.openwrt.org/HardwareAcceleratedCrypto) pointless for wifi encryption?
Of course for VPN stuff that's a different story.

(Last edited by ttest on 22 Oct 2006, 22:31)