Lightweight and Fast WiFi Access in Virtual Machines
Talkat Open Source Summit Europe 2023 · on Thursday, 2023-09-21· at 11:00· Room 0E-2 (Floor 0), Abandoibarra Etorb., 4, 48011 Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain·
summary
A lightweight Wi‑Fi kernel driver called vwifi implements a minimal subset of 802.11 on top of cfg80211, converting 802.11 management frames into Ethernet frames and tracking BSS membership with a MAC table so it can use a virtio‑net backend (tap + bridge) inside VMs. Scanning costs 63 vs 2,675 function calls compared with the kernel Hardware SIM, deployment needs only small VM changes, performance on datapath matches Hardware SIM due to protocol stack cost, and the project is MIT licensed. Future work: multiq and preallocated RX pages.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:50Need for lightweight Wi-Fi
- 4:23Introducing VIFI
- 6:54VIFI on host and VMs
- 9:46Simplified data and management
- 14:24Management path and frames
- 18:44VIFI vs Hardware SIM
- 20:52Future work and licensing
- 22:24Q&A
related talks
51mNew Wireless Daemon for Linux
28mVirtio on Type-1 hypervisors
41mVirtIo-Net PCIe Function Using Linux PCI Endpoint Framework- 41mVirtIo-Net PCIe Function Using Linux PCI Endpoint Framework
35mVirtio-Loopback: An Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for Non-Virtualized Environm...
48mUnpacking the Linux WiFi Stack: Writing and Integrating Wireless Drivers
30mVirtio for PCI Endpoint Subsystem in Linux Kernel
21mVirtio Devices Emulation in SPDK Based on Vfio-User Protocol