11 ms·

Still no love for WPA3 on the Raspberry Pi 5

221 points by picture 3y ago

snvzz 3y ago
And it still requires 5v at high current (higher now, gotta buy a new power supply), not supporting the higher voltages most phone chargers can supply a lot of power on. And still boots with a bespoke, incompatible and awful boot process, instead of standard ARM SystemReady. And still uses legacy ISA (ARM) instead of open standard RISC-V.
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  Arm is by no means legacy. Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers. That specifically means using cheap hardware. Typically cheapness is this volume level comes from reusing components that have had their r&d paid off by high volume or previous successful products. This is pretty much my you don’t see SBCs with current gen smartphone performance. RISC-V may get there eventually, but devices like the raspberry pi won’t be the first place to look
  - bigiain 3y ago
    "Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers." They lived up to that goal 10 years ago. But there are "stated goals" and "actions", and actions speak the truth when they're in conflict with stated goals. The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers. The Pi Foundation hasn't demonstrated any success getting affordable computers into the hands of anyone except high volume commercial buyers in the last few years. They're riding on their "hobbyist" reputation and taking advantage of everything hobbyists (and educators and open sourer developers) have done for their product, while turning their backs on all those people. Why would any open source dev bother fixing their Wi-Fi drivers for them, when they won't even sell you their board to test on reliably?
    - 542458 3y ago
      > The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers While Pis were a hot commodity about a year ago, today as far as I can tell consumer Pi supply is mostly back to normal. My local vendor has stock of 0s and 0Ws, 02Ws, every memory config of 4B other than the 1GB, 3As, picos in all configs, and some flavors of CM4. Yes, 5s are somewhat hard to get, but I don’t think it’s big institutional customers soaking those up - there isn’t a CM form factor for them yet, and besides, nobody would have had time to build a full product around them yet.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      It seems so weird to me when people express this opinion. There was a once in a century global pandemic that so severely crushed supply chains that even car manufacturers couldn't produce cars. What do we expect Raspberry Pi to do when this happens? They apparently have both business customers and hobby customers. They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. I have no idea what the financial internals at Raspberry Pi are, but I also know that they did not cause nor want the chip shortage to happen, and it is kind of out of their hands whether such a thing happens again. So without knowing what they really should have done, why fault them for this decision?
      - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. The correct decision would in my opinion have been: prioritize the business customers as the Raspberry Pi Foundation did (exactly because of such a reason), but let them pay grossly inflated prizes for this privilege, which hardly any private customer would be willing to pay. If such a course of action had been done, hardly any hobbyist would have complained, in particular or for example if such "exploitative" prizes for business customers would have been used to subsidize Raspberry Pis for schools during the pandemic (which was the original mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation).
    - 3y ago
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Nothing proves to me that you haven’t gotten the slightest idea about what you are talking about than the claim that ARM is a legacy technology. The fastest RISC-V core available is nowhere near ARM chip speeds; the core itself is proprietary; the drivers can easily still be proprietary because RISC-V says nothing about open-source drivers or boot toolchains; and it would probably be more expensive like all bespoke technology is.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  You only need a new supply if you want to push particularly high 5v current to devices plugged into the Pi.
ThrowawayR2 3y ago
That raises the question: which Raspberry Pi OS-compatible USB wi-fi adapters do happen to support WPA3?
jandrese 3y ago
The hostapd support is also buggy and has actually been getting worse over the years.
- e12e 3y ago
  I've been trying to figure out if there are any hw out there that allows good wifi6/hostap support under Linux, to run an access point - the nearest I've come is this[1] list. But I'm still unsure if it is feasible to build an access point on top of an Intel/AMD minipc with contemporary hw? I'd be happy to run on arm or riscv if I can get high throughput and can expect Linux kernel support for a decade or so. [1] https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers
  - FredFS456 3y ago
    I would imagine that anything supported by openwrt and has good feedback from the community would be solid.
    - e12e 3y ago
      I've found it tricky to find updated hw with openwrt support - and tricky to find devices that is easy to buy the correct hw version of. If you don't want wifi6 or 5ghz support, it's easier.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    Try intel ax201, it works great for me and it's still relatively cheap.... works great on x86_64, not sure about risc/arm. (not affiliated, don't work for intel, have a bunch of other cards, most were a pain).
    - zokier 3y ago
      iwlwifi devices do not have 5GHz AP mode :(
  - patrakov 3y ago
shadowgovt 3y ago
I can't help but wonder if thermal load is an issue. I just recently got a raspi 5 and the wifi chip is flaky. I can't help but wonder if they're fighting the edge of the board's thermal load and a chip supporting WPA3 would be too much.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  Nope. It's just a matter of poorly maintained brcmfmac driver in mainline Linux. It gets barely any attention from companies that produce the hardware it supports. All it takes to fix it is for Broadcom to get serious about their software support.
opan 3y ago
The Raspberry Pi using Broadcom chips has always made it hard to take seriously. How are competing boards with RockChip SoCs doing on this front? WiFi support is kind of a mess of nasty blobs across the board unless you go back to Wireless AC or N, though. I have been wanting an AC option that works with linux-libre on Guix System. I once bought a RealTek USB WLAN adapter after seeing what looked like a firmware repo with a free software license, but apparently it wasn't the actual source, just a binary, so still needed reverse-engineering work. I just chucked it in a drawer for now and only use ethernet on the laptop I'd intended it for. It would be cool to see a group effort to find the most common WiFi chips used in devices and work on REing them. Liberate as many devices at once as possible.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Wifi cannot be legally liberated in the US due to FCC regulations.
  - veqq 3y ago
    Could you explain more?
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      The FCC doesn't want people modifying their routers such that they use more power than they are allowed to. This results in end users being unable to modify the firmware that controls the radios.
      - pierat 3y ago
        It's not "they don't want people'. It's that ISM has power limits, and most radio freqs also has "minimum power to accomplish communication". And the FCC knows in contentious RF environments, loudness wars would inevitably happen, as we saw in CB during the 1970s. And in 5.8GHz, wifi is a secondary priority to radar scanning applications. Again, human operators know this. The FCC is being a good steward in preventing the downward slope of the tragedy of the commons. And, well, that's their mission. We can't trust non-licensed human operators to not take the volume to 11, and TX when they shouldn't. Id rather have hardware blobs that enforce FCC law than locked down devices.
belval 3y ago
Hot take: The advantages of WPA3 makes it irrelevant to most consumers and if RasPi saved a dollar by not including it then I am 100% ok with their decision. WEP was garbage because it could be cracked in minutes on a laptop. WPA3 is mostly a WPA2 revision that mitigates very expensive attacks.
- ianlevesque 3y ago
  They didn’t save anything. The hardware they shipped supports it but Broadcom can’t be bothered to release a driver.
  - cfiggers 3y ago
    Paying engineers to develop said driver costs at least "a buck."
    - simfree 3y ago
      When the alternative is no connectivity, resulting in a product that gets returned at ever increasing rates, you have to go and fix the issue. Already I have run across a plethora of devices that do not connect to networks in WPA2/WPA3 mix mode. Consumers who are not technically literate will return new hardware they buy that doesn't connect to their WPA3 enabled Wi-Fi network. Their iPhone and laptop connect to it without issue, thus it must be a defective device if your IoT thing won't connect to the existing WPA3 network.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    So does that mean the Raspberry Pi 5 sold today could enable it at some point in the future, if someone like Broadcom decides to provide that driver?
    - ianlevesque 3y ago
      Yes, it sure does.
- kevinday 3y ago
gjsman-1000 3y ago
I’m not sold on this being an issue. Maybe by the Pi 6 or Pi 7 it will matter. >90% of people don’t use WPA3. And a huge part of those that do (including myself) have networks with automatic WPA2 fallback even though that neutralizes most benefits. Maybe in 5 years it will be different. In my opinion though, it won’t matter until the day that one ISP somewhere ships a WPA3-exclusive router, which isn’t happening soon.
- lazide 3y ago
  Or ever? Most folks have at least some equipment they’ll be livid to not be able to use.
  - lmm 3y ago
    It'll happen eventually, just like 2G phone coverage getting turned off.
    - lazide 3y ago
      So in another decade or two? Though the difference here is that was common infrastructure managed by large companies. No reason a home router won’t stick around a lot longer. A non trivial number of people still have land lines with rotary phones!
      - lmm 3y ago
        > So in another decade or two? Maybe. Maybe less. Worth worrying about if you're doing a hardware project that's going to be around for a while. > Though the difference here is that was common infrastructure managed by large companies. > No reason a home router won’t stick around a lot longer. A lot of the time people's home router is tied to their ISP and they have to change it when they switch or move. > A non trivial number of people still have land lines with rotary phones! Really? My parents had to replace theirs ~5 years ago when the phone company stopped allowing pulse dialing.
        3y ago
kierank 3y ago
The incredible part is the RPi sucks less than all the other commercial embedded SBCs such that it's had huge industry uptake purely by being the least worst. The state of the embedded industry continues to amaze me.
- leonheld 3y ago
  I think you're confusing 'embedded industry' with 'embedded hobbyists', because we (the industry) don't focus on hobbyists. The RPi really does suck from a professional use-case: no volume, no 10 year guarantee, no proper industrial certifications and until a few years ago, extremely bad integration with tools like Yocto. The two segments do overlap sometimes, but it's definitely not the same beast. A lot of SBC vendors have provided great boards over the years (looking at Variscite, PHYTEC, Toradex, SECO et al), but the incentives, and thus the final product, are not what hobbyists expect.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    How does Beaglebone look to you (aka: TI's AM335x Sitara line?). I've played with it some but I'm no professional here. I personally do consider it a major contender thanks to OSD335x SiP modules (although I haven't built an OSD335x, the deadbug demo intrigues me: https://octavosystems.com/2019/04/12/osd335x-c-sip-dead-bug/ https://octavosystems.com/2019/04/12/osd335x-c-sip-dead-bug/).
    - stefan_ 3y ago
      The AM335x are extremely ancient chips by now.
      - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
        And being ancient means SKUs will be extremely finite.
        dragontamer 3y ago
gjsman-1000 3y ago
If anyone from Nintendo, Prusa, Bambu Lab, PlayStation, or Roku is reading this… WPA3 would be greatly appreciated.
- rekoil 3y ago
  Prusa i3 MK4s networking is so bad, it struggles to get up to 1Mbit with the currently implemented security protocols. I just use Ethernet with mine, it's just as bad performance-wise but at least it doesn't communicate wirelessly using insecure protocols.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Well then you won’t like WPA3’s Dragonblood attack…
cedws 3y ago
Is it possible to do stuff like Bluetooth/Wi-Fi in kernel/userspace?
geerlingguy 3y ago
Just a note that if you're _serious_ about WiFi on the Raspberry Pi... you should use an external WiFi adapter—either PCIe or USB. (Mentioned in the article, but in general, the WiFi chips built into SBCs of all varieties... aren't great.) With the Compute Module 4, I've successfully tested a variety of adapters [1], from WiFi 6E to older mini PCIe and M.2 cards. There's even a board made for the purpose of multi-WiFi testing, the Seaberry [2]. The Raspberry Pi 5 works with all the PCIe WiFi chips I've tested (haven't had time to summarize testing on pipci database site yet), including a mt7921u-based WiFi 6E USB adapter (haven't written that up, but check out [3]). [1] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/#network-cards-nics-and-wifi-adapters https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/#network-cards-nics-and-wifi-... [2] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/seaberry.html https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/seaberry.html [3] https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/issues/137#issuecomment-1730766093 https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/issues/137#issuecomment...
- spacecadet 3y ago
  I usually just velcro a Mikrotik HAP AC^2, its about the same footprint and like $25-40 on ebay.
  - tamimio 3y ago
    Pretty much yeah, RPi have their own use (like any SBC) and I like them to power a drone or UGV, but to use it as an AP/Router is kinda silly and overpriced, and it’s buggy too.
    - spacecadet 3y ago
      Nah, I was saying I dont use the onboard wifi on the Pi, it sucks. I use RJ45 to a Mikrotik Hap, then configure the hap as an AP using WPA3 etc.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  I'm curious how well AP mode works for usb cards these days. After a bunch of years with Openwrt (mostly on a bunch of netgear wgt634u's), I was pretty gung ho about trying to switch off router hardware and to more generic-computer + wifi for wireless infrastrcuture. Ideally if I could via usb cards, as those were so easy to add to even small systems like the early rpis or cheap chromeboxes. But after buying one or two of every Alfa usb cards out there with all the different chipsets, I found each chipset would have some horrible blocker. Some examples, iirc (it's been a while): Realtek-based AWUS036H would work some then die & throw a bunch of kernel messages. Atheros-based AWUS036NHA was working great, but was limited to ~8 clients. I keep hoping someday the RPI can make an actual respectable decent AP, without needing to go for a pcie carrier board (and frankly, it seems like there's not good availability for AP grade PCIe cards either... everything seems to be rebadged Compex cards, usually at astronomical prices). I keep hoping wireless can be more DIYable in general. The Morrownr/usb-wifi repo has been such a godsend. There's just been no stable repository of knowledge for so long. But I haven't dared wade back in, & figure out how I'm going to be disappointed this time around.
Namidairo 3y ago
Reminds me of the WRT3200ACM, which Linksys sold/advertised as "open-source". It's impossible to get compliant WPA3 working on said device because the final firmware blob for the radio has a broken PMF (802.11w) implementation. The entire Marvell wifi/bluetooth portfolio was later sold off to NXP, whom presumably aren't helping either as the issue remains. Most of the other vendors seem at least willing to engage, from what I can see skimming through linux-firmware.git
- p1mrx 3y ago
  Looks like you're referring to https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/389 https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/389
bastard_op 3y ago
This is going to be a more common problem with 6ghz radios and Wifi 6E/7 requiring WPA3, and no transition mode permissible per spec. I recently ran into this with a customer running Cisco Meraki AP's that it was either disable 6ghz to keep legacy devices working with wpa2-psk, which was a lot of random things including laptops with old nics, Ring doorbells, various old mobiles, etc, or replace them with not crappy/old wifi devices. We had to push all the crap like that to the guest network vs. an enterprise ssid we actually wanted to use the 6ghz with for performance. Sadly the biggest volume of Internet of Shite devices are going to be quickly every Windoze 10 system out there that Microsoft refuses to support WPA3 despite drivers, stating only Win11 would get it. Another reason for them to push people their new Telemetry spyware with improved even less privacy. Oddly I purchased a Zyxel Wifi 6E AP with 6ghz, and it does let me operate in WPA3 and/or WPA3-Transition while letting things connect to 6ghz or 2.4/5ghz, which Cisco/Meraki simply does not allow, and from my understanding correct per spec. I just have to wonder if those wacky Asian semi's are purposely ignoring that spec or simply blissfully ignorant of the fact it's not exactly adhering to rules. Either way I was annoyed with Cisco by it and recommended next time they spend less and get non-Cisco kit that were more flexible, recommending Zyxel for a literal 10th of retail cost of the same Cisco AP.
- epcoa 3y ago
  > literal 10th of retail cost of the same Cisco AP. It’s a 10th of the cost for probably 10000th of the R&D budget alone. Zyxel devices, especially the firmware are a total joke. It’s consumer grade garbage sold with quasicommercial marketing. And you use this equipment in a security sensitive environment at your own peril.
  - creshal 3y ago
    As opposed to Cisco, who have a proven security record of shipping multiple backdoors in every product.
- hiatus 3y ago
  > Sadly the biggest volume of Internet of Shite devices are going to be quickly every Windoze 10 system out there that Microsoft refuses to support WPA3 despite drivers, stating only Win11 would get it. Windows 10 seems to support WPA3. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/faster-and-more-secure-wi-fi-in-windows-26177a28-38ed-1a8e-7eca-66f24dc63f09#WindowsVersion=Windows_10 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/faster-and-more-...
loxias 3y ago
What's WPA3 for? I don't think WPA2 was cracked... More useful would be knowing what combination of kit (linux router/AP as well as device) gets me robust high speed.
- brobinson 3y ago
  https://www.krackattacks.com/ https://www.krackattacks.com/
- est31 3y ago
  WPA3 provides among other things perfect forward secrecy. If your WPA2 password becomes available to a passive attacker that has listened in for the entire communication including the handshake, they will now be able to decrypt. Or in other words, any person who gets your wifi password can (passively) listen on traffic in your network. WPA3 requires attacks to be active with a proper man in the middle (less easy to do that in a wireless setting and also only applies to the future).
  - loxias 3y ago
    Ah, PFS. PFS is good :) Thanks for your response. (I was feigning a bit of ignorance, I'm a bit of a minor crypto nerd.) OK, cool, so WPA3 has PFS. But so does wireguard. When I opine "what's really the _point_ of WPA3? (and wpa2!) I'm mentally comparing it to _no_ encryption at layer 1 (aka open network), but with performant (and arguably more secure) encryption at layer 3.
    - caskstrength 3y ago
      Not all people are (self proclaimed) "crypto nerds" who have Wireguard-based VPN running on all their wireless devices at all times. I would venture a guess that absolute majority of people don't.
      - GTP 3y ago
        I sencond this, better to implement encryption at the lower layers, so that people get protected regardless of how the upper layers are built/configured.
not_your_vase 3y ago
Personally I would be happy with any kind of stable wireless support, even the most unsecure or obsolete one. My Pi3 and Pi4 both can't maintain stable wifi connection for more than a week. After that they simply become unresponsive on the network - I got to unload and reload the driver to make them communicate through the network. I solved this on one of them by simply connecting though ethernet, but the other one is still a constant pain. I have given up using built-in Bluetooth and Wifi at the same time years ago, when they were interfering with each other. Nevertheless, I wonder if that is still the case.
- ahepp 3y ago
  Have you turned off power saving?
- hellweaver666 3y ago
  I have six Raspberry Pi's (from the Pi Zero W all the way to the Pi 4) plus several other wifi microcontrollers (ESP8266, ESP32, Pico W etc) doing things around my home and they all happily sit on my wireless network without an issue. Is it possible that your home is subject to some kind of interference that they are struggling to cope with? I used to work support for an ISP and we would always get customers calling up complaining that our wifi router was shit, but it almost always turned out to be some weird unshielded device causing electrical interference (I remember we would always get a glut of these calls around December when people plugged their cheap Christmas tree lights in!).
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    How do you find out which device is the cause? Our family home has a strangely cursed wifi, after changing 4 routers it seems to have stabilised, but I still dont know why
  - not_your_vase 3y ago
    I have many other devices also on the same network: 2 iPads 24/7, Mac Mini 24/7, 2 Linux laptops running at least 16h/day, smartphones, PS3, PS4, etc etc... in a small apartment. I'm a city dweller, wifi routers trying to scream over each other, there are like 50 networks visible where I sit. But: if there is some interference, I would expect at least some other devices to expose the same behavior, at least occasionally. But exclusively only the Rpis are doing this - after 4-10 days of uptime, they just give up on the wireless network, without any error message or any other clue. Nevertheless, I have done countless hours of troubleshooting and investigations, and not looking for more anymore. RPis are great for many things, and pretty crappy for many other things. I found their wireless capabilities to be on the crappier side.
prmoustache 3y ago
Is WPA3 ubiquitous? I have yet to see a WPA3 network and I don't see myself switching to 6Ghz at home while I am better off using 2.4Ghz than 5Ghz due to thick walls and lack of power outlets.
- pmontra 3y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. I'm using 2.4 GHz and sometimes I lose signal when there is a think wall or a floor between my phone and the access point, especially when the wall is at a small angle and the signal has to pierce many meters of bricks. Furthermore there is the problem of radio interference. I wired all my Raspberry and equivalent devices. One of them runs tvheadend to stream the TV signal I get from the antenna on the roof. I had freezes in the stream to my phone and tablet and they went away after I connected that RPi3 with an Ethernet cable. I think that the packets of the stream and the ACKs at TCP and possibly at application level (I don't know which protocol it uses, VLC handles it) were interfering and one of the devices had to stop transmitting from time to time.
- IvyMike 3y ago
  Latest wigle.net shows <1% WPA3. It is up a lot from last year, when it was <0.1%. https://wigle.net/stats https://wigle.net/stats That being said, a flagship system should have future-looking support.
DannyBee 3y ago
We have a patch for the driver in asahi Linux that I bet fixes this. The codepath the driver uses to set the password does not work on newer firmware, and hector fixed it to use the new way. If that fails I have a patch that lets it use an external supplicant for WPA3 when it it truly unsupported by the chip (which is rare) The driver is unfortunately not kept up to date - this stuff should have been added (along with other things) years ago. Edit: Actually looks like hector just sent it in response to this blog post. Should show up in the kernel archives soon if you want to try it
- smith7018 3y ago
  Asahi Linux is one of the most exciting Linux projects in years. That team is world class and helping all of us while also prying open Apple's walled garden.
  - DannyBee 3y ago
    In this case, we aren't the only ones to fix this. Infineon fixed it in their driver patches as well, at least a year ago. They just don't upstream them (though they are in github) In some ways this actually sucks more - because everyone is spending time rediscovering the same issues and fixing them. Also, Rachel is i think wrong on one thing - i believe this chipset was used as far back as RPI3B+ (or so various sources seem to say) Which is even worse.
mavhc 3y ago
Mac OS computers that don't run ARM can't do OWE either, so now I have 2 guest networks, sigh.

221 points by picture 3y ago

And it still requires 5v at high current (higher now, gotta buy a new power supply), not supporting the higher voltages most phone chargers can supply a lot of power on. And still boots with a bespoke, incompatible and awful boot process, instead of standard ARM SystemReady. And still uses legacy ISA (ARM) instead of open standard RISC-V.

MobiusHorizons 3y ago
Arm is by no means legacy. Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers. That specifically means using cheap hardware. Typically cheapness is this volume level comes from reusing components that have had their r&d paid off by high volume or previous successful products. This is pretty much my you don’t see SBCs with current gen smartphone performance. RISC-V may get there eventually, but devices like the raspberry pi won’t be the first place to look
- bigiain 3y ago
  "Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers." They lived up to that goal 10 years ago. But there are "stated goals" and "actions", and actions speak the truth when they're in conflict with stated goals. The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers. The Pi Foundation hasn't demonstrated any success getting affordable computers into the hands of anyone except high volume commercial buyers in the last few years. They're riding on their "hobbyist" reputation and taking advantage of everything hobbyists (and educators and open sourer developers) have done for their product, while turning their backs on all those people. Why would any open source dev bother fixing their Wi-Fi drivers for them, when they won't even sell you their board to test on reliably?
  - 542458 3y ago
    > The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers While Pis were a hot commodity about a year ago, today as far as I can tell consumer Pi supply is mostly back to normal. My local vendor has stock of 0s and 0Ws, 02Ws, every memory config of 4B other than the 1GB, 3As, picos in all configs, and some flavors of CM4. Yes, 5s are somewhat hard to get, but I don’t think it’s big institutional customers soaking those up - there isn’t a CM form factor for them yet, and besides, nobody would have had time to build a full product around them yet.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    It seems so weird to me when people express this opinion. There was a once in a century global pandemic that so severely crushed supply chains that even car manufacturers couldn't produce cars. What do we expect Raspberry Pi to do when this happens? They apparently have both business customers and hobby customers. They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. I have no idea what the financial internals at Raspberry Pi are, but I also know that they did not cause nor want the chip shortage to happen, and it is kind of out of their hands whether such a thing happens again. So without knowing what they really should have done, why fault them for this decision?
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. The correct decision would in my opinion have been: prioritize the business customers as the Raspberry Pi Foundation did (exactly because of such a reason), but let them pay grossly inflated prizes for this privilege, which hardly any private customer would be willing to pay. If such a course of action had been done, hardly any hobbyist would have complained, in particular or for example if such "exploitative" prizes for business customers would have been used to subsidize Raspberry Pis for schools during the pandemic (which was the original mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation).
  - 3y ago
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Nothing proves to me that you haven’t gotten the slightest idea about what you are talking about than the claim that ARM is a legacy technology. The fastest RISC-V core available is nowhere near ARM chip speeds; the core itself is proprietary; the drivers can easily still be proprietary because RISC-V says nothing about open-source drivers or boot toolchains; and it would probably be more expensive like all bespoke technology is.
Dylan16807 3y ago
You only need a new supply if you want to push particularly high 5v current to devices plugged into the Pi.

ThrowawayR2 3y ago

That raises the question: which Raspberry Pi OS-compatible USB wi-fi adapters do happen to support WPA3?

jandrese 3y ago

The hostapd support is also buggy and has actually been getting worse over the years.

e12e 3y ago
I've been trying to figure out if there are any hw out there that allows good wifi6/hostap support under Linux, to run an access point - the nearest I've come is this[1] list. But I'm still unsure if it is feasible to build an access point on top of an Intel/AMD minipc with contemporary hw? I'd be happy to run on arm or riscv if I can get high throughput and can expect Linux kernel support for a decade or so. [1] https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers
- FredFS456 3y ago
  I would imagine that anything supported by openwrt and has good feedback from the community would be solid.
  - e12e 3y ago
    I've found it tricky to find updated hw with openwrt support - and tricky to find devices that is easy to buy the correct hw version of. If you don't want wifi6 or 5ghz support, it's easier.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Try intel ax201, it works great for me and it's still relatively cheap.... works great on x86_64, not sure about risc/arm. (not affiliated, don't work for intel, have a bunch of other cards, most were a pain).
  - zokier 3y ago
    iwlwifi devices do not have 5GHz AP mode :(
- patrakov 3y ago

shadowgovt 3y ago

I can't help but wonder if thermal load is an issue. I just recently got a raspi 5 and the wifi chip is flaky. I can't help but wonder if they're fighting the edge of the board's thermal load and a chip supporting WPA3 would be too much.

seba_dos1 3y ago
Nope. It's just a matter of poorly maintained brcmfmac driver in mainline Linux. It gets barely any attention from companies that produce the hardware it supports. All it takes to fix it is for Broadcom to get serious about their software support.

opan 3y ago

The Raspberry Pi using Broadcom chips has always made it hard to take seriously. How are competing boards with RockChip SoCs doing on this front? WiFi support is kind of a mess of nasty blobs across the board unless you go back to Wireless AC or N, though. I have been wanting an AC option that works with linux-libre on Guix System. I once bought a RealTek USB WLAN adapter after seeing what looked like a firmware repo with a free software license, but apparently it wasn't the actual source, just a binary, so still needed reverse-engineering work. I just chucked it in a drawer for now and only use ethernet on the laptop I'd intended it for. It would be cool to see a group effort to find the most common WiFi chips used in devices and work on REing them. Liberate as many devices at once as possible.

charcircuit 3y ago
Wifi cannot be legally liberated in the US due to FCC regulations.
- veqq 3y ago
  Could you explain more?
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    The FCC doesn't want people modifying their routers such that they use more power than they are allowed to. This results in end users being unable to modify the firmware that controls the radios.
    - pierat 3y ago
      It's not "they don't want people'. It's that ISM has power limits, and most radio freqs also has "minimum power to accomplish communication". And the FCC knows in contentious RF environments, loudness wars would inevitably happen, as we saw in CB during the 1970s. And in 5.8GHz, wifi is a secondary priority to radar scanning applications. Again, human operators know this. The FCC is being a good steward in preventing the downward slope of the tragedy of the commons. And, well, that's their mission. We can't trust non-licensed human operators to not take the volume to 11, and TX when they shouldn't. Id rather have hardware blobs that enforce FCC law than locked down devices.

belval 3y ago

Hot take: The advantages of WPA3 makes it irrelevant to most consumers and if RasPi saved a dollar by not including it then I am 100% ok with their decision. WEP was garbage because it could be cracked in minutes on a laptop. WPA3 is mostly a WPA2 revision that mitigates very expensive attacks.

ianlevesque 3y ago
They didn’t save anything. The hardware they shipped supports it but Broadcom can’t be bothered to release a driver.
- cfiggers 3y ago
  Paying engineers to develop said driver costs at least "a buck."
  - simfree 3y ago
    When the alternative is no connectivity, resulting in a product that gets returned at ever increasing rates, you have to go and fix the issue. Already I have run across a plethora of devices that do not connect to networks in WPA2/WPA3 mix mode. Consumers who are not technically literate will return new hardware they buy that doesn't connect to their WPA3 enabled Wi-Fi network. Their iPhone and laptop connect to it without issue, thus it must be a defective device if your IoT thing won't connect to the existing WPA3 network.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  So does that mean the Raspberry Pi 5 sold today could enable it at some point in the future, if someone like Broadcom decides to provide that driver?
  - ianlevesque 3y ago
    Yes, it sure does.
kevinday 3y ago

gjsman-1000 3y ago

I’m not sold on this being an issue. Maybe by the Pi 6 or Pi 7 it will matter. >90% of people don’t use WPA3. And a huge part of those that do (including myself) have networks with automatic WPA2 fallback even though that neutralizes most benefits. Maybe in 5 years it will be different. In my opinion though, it won’t matter until the day that one ISP somewhere ships a WPA3-exclusive router, which isn’t happening soon.

lazide 3y ago
Or ever? Most folks have at least some equipment they’ll be livid to not be able to use.
- lmm 3y ago
  It'll happen eventually, just like 2G phone coverage getting turned off.
  - lazide 3y ago
    So in another decade or two? Though the difference here is that was common infrastructure managed by large companies. No reason a home router won’t stick around a lot longer. A non trivial number of people still have land lines with rotary phones!
    - lmm 3y ago
      > So in another decade or two? Maybe. Maybe less. Worth worrying about if you're doing a hardware project that's going to be around for a while. > Though the difference here is that was common infrastructure managed by large companies. > No reason a home router won’t stick around a lot longer. A lot of the time people's home router is tied to their ISP and they have to change it when they switch or move. > A non trivial number of people still have land lines with rotary phones! Really? My parents had to replace theirs ~5 years ago when the phone company stopped allowing pulse dialing.
      - 3y ago

kierank 3y ago

The incredible part is the RPi sucks less than all the other commercial embedded SBCs such that it's had huge industry uptake purely by being the least worst. The state of the embedded industry continues to amaze me.

leonheld 3y ago
I think you're confusing 'embedded industry' with 'embedded hobbyists', because we (the industry) don't focus on hobbyists. The RPi really does suck from a professional use-case: no volume, no 10 year guarantee, no proper industrial certifications and until a few years ago, extremely bad integration with tools like Yocto. The two segments do overlap sometimes, but it's definitely not the same beast. A lot of SBC vendors have provided great boards over the years (looking at Variscite, PHYTEC, Toradex, SECO et al), but the incentives, and thus the final product, are not what hobbyists expect.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  How does Beaglebone look to you (aka: TI's AM335x Sitara line?). I've played with it some but I'm no professional here. I personally do consider it a major contender thanks to OSD335x SiP modules (although I haven't built an OSD335x, the deadbug demo intrigues me: https://octavosystems.com/2019/04/12/osd335x-c-sip-dead-bug/ https://octavosystems.com/2019/04/12/osd335x-c-sip-dead-bug/).
  - stefan_ 3y ago
    The AM335x are extremely ancient chips by now.
    - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
      And being ancient means SKUs will be extremely finite.
      - dragontamer 3y ago

gjsman-1000 3y ago

If anyone from Nintendo, Prusa, Bambu Lab, PlayStation, or Roku is reading this… WPA3 would be greatly appreciated.

rekoil 3y ago
Prusa i3 MK4s networking is so bad, it struggles to get up to 1Mbit with the currently implemented security protocols. I just use Ethernet with mine, it's just as bad performance-wise but at least it doesn't communicate wirelessly using insecure protocols.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Well then you won’t like WPA3’s Dragonblood attack…

cedws 3y ago

Is it possible to do stuff like Bluetooth/Wi-Fi in kernel/userspace?

geerlingguy 3y ago

Just a note that if you're _serious_ about WiFi on the Raspberry Pi... you should use an external WiFi adapter—either PCIe or USB. (Mentioned in the article, but in general, the WiFi chips built into SBCs of all varieties... aren't great.) With the Compute Module 4, I've successfully tested a variety of adapters [1], from WiFi 6E to older mini PCIe and M.2 cards. There's even a board made for the purpose of multi-WiFi testing, the Seaberry [2]. The Raspberry Pi 5 works with all the PCIe WiFi chips I've tested (haven't had time to summarize testing on pipci database site yet), including a mt7921u-based WiFi 6E USB adapter (haven't written that up, but check out [3]). [1] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/#network-cards-nics-and-wifi-adapters https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/#network-cards-nics-and-wifi-... [2] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/seaberry.html https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/seaberry.html [3] https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/issues/137#issuecomment-1730766093 https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/issues/137#issuecomment...

spacecadet 3y ago
I usually just velcro a Mikrotik HAP AC^2, its about the same footprint and like $25-40 on ebay.
- tamimio 3y ago
  Pretty much yeah, RPi have their own use (like any SBC) and I like them to power a drone or UGV, but to use it as an AP/Router is kinda silly and overpriced, and it’s buggy too.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    Nah, I was saying I dont use the onboard wifi on the Pi, it sucks. I use RJ45 to a Mikrotik Hap, then configure the hap as an AP using WPA3 etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I'm curious how well AP mode works for usb cards these days. After a bunch of years with Openwrt (mostly on a bunch of netgear wgt634u's), I was pretty gung ho about trying to switch off router hardware and to more generic-computer + wifi for wireless infrastrcuture. Ideally if I could via usb cards, as those were so easy to add to even small systems like the early rpis or cheap chromeboxes. But after buying one or two of every Alfa usb cards out there with all the different chipsets, I found each chipset would have some horrible blocker. Some examples, iirc (it's been a while): Realtek-based AWUS036H would work some then die & throw a bunch of kernel messages. Atheros-based AWUS036NHA was working great, but was limited to ~8 clients. I keep hoping someday the RPI can make an actual respectable decent AP, without needing to go for a pcie carrier board (and frankly, it seems like there's not good availability for AP grade PCIe cards either... everything seems to be rebadged Compex cards, usually at astronomical prices). I keep hoping wireless can be more DIYable in general. The Morrownr/usb-wifi repo has been such a godsend. There's just been no stable repository of knowledge for so long. But I haven't dared wade back in, & figure out how I'm going to be disappointed this time around.

Namidairo 3y ago

Reminds me of the WRT3200ACM, which Linksys sold/advertised as "open-source". It's impossible to get compliant WPA3 working on said device because the final firmware blob for the radio has a broken PMF (802.11w) implementation. The entire Marvell wifi/bluetooth portfolio was later sold off to NXP, whom presumably aren't helping either as the issue remains. Most of the other vendors seem at least willing to engage, from what I can see skimming through linux-firmware.git

p1mrx 3y ago
Looks like you're referring to https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/389 https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/389

bastard_op 3y ago

This is going to be a more common problem with 6ghz radios and Wifi 6E/7 requiring WPA3, and no transition mode permissible per spec. I recently ran into this with a customer running Cisco Meraki AP's that it was either disable 6ghz to keep legacy devices working with wpa2-psk, which was a lot of random things including laptops with old nics, Ring doorbells, various old mobiles, etc, or replace them with not crappy/old wifi devices. We had to push all the crap like that to the guest network vs. an enterprise ssid we actually wanted to use the 6ghz with for performance. Sadly the biggest volume of Internet of Shite devices are going to be quickly every Windoze 10 system out there that Microsoft refuses to support WPA3 despite drivers, stating only Win11 would get it. Another reason for them to push people their new Telemetry spyware with improved even less privacy. Oddly I purchased a Zyxel Wifi 6E AP with 6ghz, and it does let me operate in WPA3 and/or WPA3-Transition while letting things connect to 6ghz or 2.4/5ghz, which Cisco/Meraki simply does not allow, and from my understanding correct per spec. I just have to wonder if those wacky Asian semi's are purposely ignoring that spec or simply blissfully ignorant of the fact it's not exactly adhering to rules. Either way I was annoyed with Cisco by it and recommended next time they spend less and get non-Cisco kit that were more flexible, recommending Zyxel for a literal 10th of retail cost of the same Cisco AP.

epcoa 3y ago
> literal 10th of retail cost of the same Cisco AP. It’s a 10th of the cost for probably 10000th of the R&D budget alone. Zyxel devices, especially the firmware are a total joke. It’s consumer grade garbage sold with quasicommercial marketing. And you use this equipment in a security sensitive environment at your own peril.
- creshal 3y ago
  As opposed to Cisco, who have a proven security record of shipping multiple backdoors in every product.
hiatus 3y ago
> Sadly the biggest volume of Internet of Shite devices are going to be quickly every Windoze 10 system out there that Microsoft refuses to support WPA3 despite drivers, stating only Win11 would get it. Windows 10 seems to support WPA3. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/faster-and-more-secure-wi-fi-in-windows-26177a28-38ed-1a8e-7eca-66f24dc63f09#WindowsVersion=Windows_10 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/faster-and-more-...

loxias 3y ago

What's WPA3 for? I don't think WPA2 was cracked... More useful would be knowing what combination of kit (linux router/AP as well as device) gets me robust high speed.

brobinson 3y ago
https://www.krackattacks.com/ https://www.krackattacks.com/
est31 3y ago
WPA3 provides among other things perfect forward secrecy. If your WPA2 password becomes available to a passive attacker that has listened in for the entire communication including the handshake, they will now be able to decrypt. Or in other words, any person who gets your wifi password can (passively) listen on traffic in your network. WPA3 requires attacks to be active with a proper man in the middle (less easy to do that in a wireless setting and also only applies to the future).
- loxias 3y ago
  Ah, PFS. PFS is good :) Thanks for your response. (I was feigning a bit of ignorance, I'm a bit of a minor crypto nerd.) OK, cool, so WPA3 has PFS. But so does wireguard. When I opine "what's really the _point_ of WPA3? (and wpa2!) I'm mentally comparing it to _no_ encryption at layer 1 (aka open network), but with performant (and arguably more secure) encryption at layer 3.
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    Not all people are (self proclaimed) "crypto nerds" who have Wireguard-based VPN running on all their wireless devices at all times. I would venture a guess that absolute majority of people don't.
    - GTP 3y ago
      I sencond this, better to implement encryption at the lower layers, so that people get protected regardless of how the upper layers are built/configured.

not_your_vase 3y ago

Personally I would be happy with any kind of stable wireless support, even the most unsecure or obsolete one. My Pi3 and Pi4 both can't maintain stable wifi connection for more than a week. After that they simply become unresponsive on the network - I got to unload and reload the driver to make them communicate through the network. I solved this on one of them by simply connecting though ethernet, but the other one is still a constant pain. I have given up using built-in Bluetooth and Wifi at the same time years ago, when they were interfering with each other. Nevertheless, I wonder if that is still the case.

ahepp 3y ago
Have you turned off power saving?
hellweaver666 3y ago
I have six Raspberry Pi's (from the Pi Zero W all the way to the Pi 4) plus several other wifi microcontrollers (ESP8266, ESP32, Pico W etc) doing things around my home and they all happily sit on my wireless network without an issue. Is it possible that your home is subject to some kind of interference that they are struggling to cope with? I used to work support for an ISP and we would always get customers calling up complaining that our wifi router was shit, but it almost always turned out to be some weird unshielded device causing electrical interference (I remember we would always get a glut of these calls around December when people plugged their cheap Christmas tree lights in!).
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  How do you find out which device is the cause? Our family home has a strangely cursed wifi, after changing 4 routers it seems to have stabilised, but I still dont know why
- not_your_vase 3y ago
  I have many other devices also on the same network: 2 iPads 24/7, Mac Mini 24/7, 2 Linux laptops running at least 16h/day, smartphones, PS3, PS4, etc etc... in a small apartment. I'm a city dweller, wifi routers trying to scream over each other, there are like 50 networks visible where I sit. But: if there is some interference, I would expect at least some other devices to expose the same behavior, at least occasionally. But exclusively only the Rpis are doing this - after 4-10 days of uptime, they just give up on the wireless network, without any error message or any other clue. Nevertheless, I have done countless hours of troubleshooting and investigations, and not looking for more anymore. RPis are great for many things, and pretty crappy for many other things. I found their wireless capabilities to be on the crappier side.

prmoustache 3y ago

Is WPA3 ubiquitous? I have yet to see a WPA3 network and I don't see myself switching to 6Ghz at home while I am better off using 2.4Ghz than 5Ghz due to thick walls and lack of power outlets.

pmontra 3y ago
Exactly my thoughts. I'm using 2.4 GHz and sometimes I lose signal when there is a think wall or a floor between my phone and the access point, especially when the wall is at a small angle and the signal has to pierce many meters of bricks. Furthermore there is the problem of radio interference. I wired all my Raspberry and equivalent devices. One of them runs tvheadend to stream the TV signal I get from the antenna on the roof. I had freezes in the stream to my phone and tablet and they went away after I connected that RPi3 with an Ethernet cable. I think that the packets of the stream and the ACKs at TCP and possibly at application level (I don't know which protocol it uses, VLC handles it) were interfering and one of the devices had to stop transmitting from time to time.
IvyMike 3y ago
Latest wigle.net shows <1% WPA3. It is up a lot from last year, when it was <0.1%. https://wigle.net/stats https://wigle.net/stats That being said, a flagship system should have future-looking support.

DannyBee 3y ago

We have a patch for the driver in asahi Linux that I bet fixes this. The codepath the driver uses to set the password does not work on newer firmware, and hector fixed it to use the new way. If that fails I have a patch that lets it use an external supplicant for WPA3 when it it truly unsupported by the chip (which is rare) The driver is unfortunately not kept up to date - this stuff should have been added (along with other things) years ago. Edit: Actually looks like hector just sent it in response to this blog post. Should show up in the kernel archives soon if you want to try it

smith7018 3y ago
Asahi Linux is one of the most exciting Linux projects in years. That team is world class and helping all of us while also prying open Apple's walled garden.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  In this case, we aren't the only ones to fix this. Infineon fixed it in their driver patches as well, at least a year ago. They just don't upstream them (though they are in github) In some ways this actually sucks more - because everyone is spending time rediscovering the same issues and fixing them. Also, Rachel is i think wrong on one thing - i believe this chipset was used as far back as RPI3B+ (or so various sources seem to say) Which is even worse.

mavhc 3y ago

Mac OS computers that don't run ARM can't do OWE either, so now I have 2 guest networks, sigh.