Advanced Wi-Fi

The current image builds the mac80211 SoftMAC frontend, which exposes one 2.4 GHz station interface. Use esp32-config for ordinary station setup and check the connection with iw, wpa_cli, and ip; see the radio guide.

This page distinguishes current frontend limits from interfaces retained in the underlying firmware. A firmware operation or packaged utility alone does not establish that the Linux frontend exposes it.

Inspect the current interface

Run on the board:

iw dev
iw phy
wpa_cli -p /run/wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 status

Use iw phy to inspect the capabilities of the kernel you actually booted. The current driver accepts one station interface and rejects additional station or AP interfaces.

Monitor reception

mac80211 can expose a software monitor interface, but the current radio receive path retains station-oriented filtering, including dropping unrelated unicast frames. Captures therefore are not a complete promiscuous view of the channel. Do not use this path to conclude that absent packets were absent over the air.

tcpdump is not selected in the compact rootfs. If adding capture tools for development, keep captures bounded: /tmp uses RAM, and persist is only 2120 KiB before filesystem overhead. Use attached storage for larger captures.

Access-point mode

AP, AP+station, and protected-AP operation are not exposed by the current SoftMAC frontend. The standard image includes the full board configuration; installing or running hostapd does not add AP support. The P4/C6 fixture can still provide an external AP for S31 station tests.

Enterprise authentication

Enterprise authentication needs validation through the current Linux station stack and the selected wpa_supplicant build. Use the CA and server-identity policy supplied by the network administrator when developing that integration; do not disable server validation to make a test pass.

Suspend and recovery

Current SoftMAC has no active-connection replay on resume. Its suspend helper returns EBUSY for a running interface, and the radio module propagates that error before suspending Bluetooth or stopping the shared payload. Bring Wi-Fi down before experimenting with system sleep. Automatic radio restart does not imply successful station reassociation. The HIL --wifi-suspend-cycles option is a diagnostic sequence, not an established recovery capability. See Power management before testing system sleep.