About nl80211

nl80211 is the new 802.11 netlink interface public header. Together with cfg80211 it is intended to replace Wireless-Extensions. nl80211 and cfg80211 still under development.

Users of nl80211

Current users of nl80211:

• iw

• crda

• hostapd

• wpa_supplicant (with -Dnl80211)

libnl tiny

OpenWrt folks created a tiny version of libnl based on a git snapshot, which only contains genl, not rtnetlink or any of the netfilter stuff, and compiles down to less than 30k in binary size. You can find it here: https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/libnl-tiny?rev=25101&order=name [https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/libnl-tiny]

Kerneldoc for nl80211

• include/linux/nl80211.h (kerneldoc)

• nl80211 kerneldoc warnings