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Comment by matoro | Hacker News Reader

iwd does not wrap wpa_supplicant, it's a from-scratch implementation and a much nicer one at that.

It looks like it wraps NetworkManager or ConnMann - both of which wrap around wpa_supplicant for wifi. So yep, iwd wraps wpa_supplicant.

Architecture diagram on home page: https://iwd.wiki.kernel.org/

You're reading that diagram backwards.

NetworkManager and ConnMan can optionally _USE_ iwd as a backend _INSTEAD OF_ wpa_supplicant.

iwd does _NOT_ use NetworkManager/ConnMan

Source: gentoo user who explicitly avoids the buggy disaster that is NetworkManager+wpa_supplicant whenever possible

I noticed my error. To be fair, I don't think I read the diagram backwards. I think the diagram is drawn backwards instead. In it, iwd seems to talk to the iwd backend via D-Bus as they're close together.

Or maybe that's a diagram technique I'm just not used to.

It reads as a fairly normal diagram to me; NetworkManager has an iwd backend component/plugin that talks over D-Bus to iwd, which in turn stands on top of ell which in turn stands on the kernel (which itself contains a bunch of components of interest).

NetworkManager can use iwd as a wifi backend instead of wpa_supplicant, but nm isn't needed as iwd can also manage the networks on its own. iwd should never run at the same time (on a single network interface) as wpa_supplicant, as wpa_supplicant is (almost?) entirely superseeded by it.

Oh ok, so I misread the arch diagram. I thought that iwd was talking to the iwd backend, which would then delegate to NM or CM.

It looks like you're right [0], so I stand corrected.

It also looks like it can't fully replace wpa_supplicant though:

> IWD and the NM backend are work in progress and the capabilities are still limited.

[0] https://iwd.wiki.kernel.org/networkmanager

That paragraph of the article looks to be ~6 years out of date according to the network manager version number it lists, around the time of the initial iwd release, and the whole article seems to be at least 2-3 years out of date since then iwd is well into version 2.x now.

Distros like Ubuntu have defaulted to iwd as the NM backend for Wi-Fi for a couple years (and now in the LTS version). It really is a quite popular and stable replacement to wpa_supplicant.

Alright, thanks for the information! :)

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