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I recently had to change from wpa_supplicant to iwd to get around the 200 access point search limit. It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in r

I recently had to change from wpa_supplicant to iwd to get around the 200 access point search limit. It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..

lucb1e 1mo ago
My phone uses wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-11 (from late 2021 I think) and I see in NeoStumbler that the record is at 227 access points (from this vantage point: https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m) The query for anyone else who has that app and is curious: > .he on > select reportId, count(id) as c from WifiAccessPointEntity group by reportId order by c desc limit 10; reportId|c 123|227 > select * from PositionEntity where reportId = 123; -- find where this was Are you sure it's a wpa_supplicant limitation? It sounds like a very arbitrary number, not even 2^8=256 or something, so like it should be trivial to find and chance that constant limit in the source code, if this limit exists Edit: a quick grep through the source code (`grep -rE '[^0-9]200[^0-9]'`) doesn't reveal anything that looks very promising at first glance. I'm curious what you're running into now though
- thomastjeffery 1mo ago
  It's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.
  - lucb1e 1mo ago
    Huh, why did I not see that variable in the grep results... ah, that line didn't match because I negative matched 0-9 but not 'nothing' (end of line in the config file). If it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems radical
    - thomastjeffery 1mo ago
      Unfortunately, NixOS makes it impossible to configure while NetworkManager is installed. This is because bss_max_count is a runtime var, so you have to use wpa_cli instead of a config, which requires a socket in a dir that NixOS conventionally keeps empty. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix.

I recently had to change from wpa_supplicant to iwd to get around the 200 access point search limit. It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..

lucb1e 1mo ago

My phone uses wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-11 (from late 2021 I think) and I see in NeoStumbler that the record is at 227 access points (from this vantage point: https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m) The query for anyone else who has that app and is curious: > .he on > select reportId, count(id) as c from WifiAccessPointEntity group by reportId order by c desc limit 10; reportId|c 123|227 > select * from PositionEntity where reportId = 123; -- find where this was Are you sure it's a wpa_supplicant limitation? It sounds like a very arbitrary number, not even 2^8=256 or something, so like it should be trivial to find and chance that constant limit in the source code, if this limit exists Edit: a quick grep through the source code (`grep -rE '[^0-9]200[^0-9]'`) doesn't reveal anything that looks very promising at first glance. I'm curious what you're running into now though

thomastjeffery 1mo ago
It's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.
- lucb1e 1mo ago
  Huh, why did I not see that variable in the grep results... ah, that line didn't match because I negative matched 0-9 but not 'nothing' (end of line in the config file). If it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems radical
  - thomastjeffery 1mo ago
    Unfortunately, NixOS makes it impossible to configure while NetworkManager is installed. This is because bss_max_count is a runtime var, so you have to use wpa_cli instead of a config, which requires a socket in a dir that NixOS conventionally keeps empty. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix.