Bridged Access Point - No Internet connection (wlan0: Could not connect to kernel driver)

[Skyleiger]

Describe the bug I want to create a bridged access point with my raspberry pi 4. However, after I created it, I can't get internet access through the access point. I only find the following error message in the console: wlan0: Could not connect to kernel driver The driver nl80211 does not exist, as I can see with the command modprobe nl80211 I found out.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Install the command line tools as shown on the following page: https://github.com/lakinduakash/linux-wifi-hotspot/blob/master/src/scripts/README.md
2. Create the ap with create_ap wlan0 eth0 Test testtest -m bridge
3. Connect to the ap
4. There is no internet connection available

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB RAM model)
• OS: Debian
• Version 10 (Buster)

[lakinduakash]

Does it work without bridge? Can you put outputs of readlink /sys/class/net/wlan0/device/driver and lspci -k | grep -A 4 -i network?

[Skyleiger]

Does it work without bridge? Can you put outputs of readlink /sys/class/net/wlan0/device/driver and lspci -k | grep -A 4 -i network?

root@homepi:~# readlink /sys/class/net/wlan0/device/driver
../../../../../../../../bus/sdio/drivers/brcmfmac
root@homepi:~# lspci -k | grep -A 4 -i network
root@homepi:~# 

So as you can see, the first command gives me an result, but the second doesn't.

[lakinduakash]

That's fine you don't have the driver nl80211. Your adapter use brcmfmac driver. That might be a driver issue. However, can you get internet without `bridge option?

[Skyleiger]

Yes, with a normal access point without the bridge option I get internet access. However, I would like to use the bridge option so that all devices dial into the same subnet (of the actual router), so that they can be easily found in the network afterwards (for example, my printer).

[lakinduakash]

Can you manually create a bridge interface and try to make ap until this get resolved? Then you can use create_ap -m bridge wlan0 br0 MyAccessPoint MyPassPhrase where br0 is pre-configured bridge

[pcrockett]

FWIW, I'm running this on an RPi 4 with Arch ARM and it works well. Of course I'm writing this more than two years later, so very possible something has changed since then and fixed the issue.