Intel IWD 3.0 Wireless Daemon Released For Linux Systems

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant.

It's been nearly two years since IWD 2.0 and in that time many 2.xx updates with IWD 2.22 having been the most recent stable release from September. With IWD 3.0 there aren't a whole lot of new changes but besides bug fixes the main addition is experimental support for External Authentication.

- Fix issue with handling alpha2 code for United Kingdom.
- Fix issue with handling empty TX/RX bitrate attributes.
- Fix issue with handling RSSI polling fallback workaround.
- Fix issue with handling harmless cloned information elements.
- Add experimental support for External Authentication feature.

The External Authentication feature is described in this IWD commit as:

"Certain FullMAC drivers do not expose CMD_ASSOCIATE/CMD_AUTHENTICATE, but lack the ability to fully offload SAE connections to the firmware. Such connections can still be supported on such firmware by using CMD_EXTERNAL_AUTH & CMD_FRAME. The firmware sets the NL80211_FEATURE_SAE bit (which implies support for CMD_AUTHENTICATE, but oh well), and no other offload extended features.

When CMD_CONNECT is issued, the firmware sends CMD_EXTERNAL_AUTH via unicast to the owner of the connection. The connection owner is then expected to send SAE frames with the firmware using CMD_FRAME and receive authenticate frames using unicast CMD_FRAME notifications as well. Once SAE authentication completes, userspace is expected to send a final CMD_EXTERNAL_AUTH back to the kernel with the corresponding status code. On failure, a non-0 status code should be used."

The IWD 3.0 wireless daemon is available for download from kernel.org for those rolling it on their own rather than just relying upon your Linux distribution packages.