Migrate from libiw to libnl for wireless support

[nullr0ute]

Issue

The wireless extensions interface to support WiFi has been long obsolete and doesn't support a lot of the new 802.11 functionality in the kernel. There's also discussion in the kernel community about removing it as it's been long obsolete.

Information

The new interface for dealing with 802.11 wireless interfaces on Linux is the nl80211 interface which can be used via libnl from a API PoV and the iw command line tool. The advantage is there's a lot more information and support for newer wireless technologies. A lot of distros are also starting to disable the old kernel wext support.

Information for iw is available here: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/iw Information for libnl3 is at: http://www.infradead.org/~tgr/libnl/

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is stale because it has been open 365 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment, or this issue will be closed in 30 days.

[nullr0ute]

This is still relevant, in fact even more so because newer wifi (at least wifi 7) will be blocked from the old wireless extensions so won't appear.

[AAnzel]

I agree with @nullr0ute. This issue should have high priority.

[Caellian]

Attaching details from my other issue:

the version of conky available in the fedora repository does not support wifi.

Conky uses an old library to access wifi data from your system. This library is now deprecated in fedora.

hence fedora packages conky without wireless support since fedora 36 :(

Originally posted by @ernesto1 in https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/issues/1664#issuecomment-1918308964

Related build options: BUILD_WLAN

Old include is libiw.h, new structures are:

• cf80211_ops – from net/cfg80211.h
• ieee80211_ops – from net/mac80211.h

Developer guide: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.9/80211/index.html

[raviksharma]

libiw-dev (wireless-tools) is being removed from Ubuntu 24.10. You can use libnl3 as a replacement. Here is Ubuntu 24.10 schedule for reference.