L2 bridge of WiFi access point to anything else (like wired Ethernet, for example) "just works". On the other hand, L2 bridge of WiFi station to anything else

L2 bridge of WiFi access point to anything else (like wired Ethernet, for example) "just works". On the other hand, L2 bridge of WiFi station to anything else (including STA<->AP bridge for a repeater operation) is quite messy: it needs special "4addr mode" packets which are only sent in "WDS" mode, which should be enabled on corresponding uplink AP. And WDS is universally disabled out-of-the box. Many cheaper routers don't have WDS at all. Plus, there are different incompatible flavours of WDS. Finally, there is question of WDS/4addr mode support on ESP8266 itself - in theory, there is some support in SDK, but I haven't seen any working application code doing it. Some in-depth discussion of WDS with diagrams: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/clientmode https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/clientmode https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/WDS#Note_about_WDS_and_different_chip_manufacturers https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/WDS#Note_about_WDS_and...