The WPA supplicant utility, wpa_supplicant, must be launched during startup and runs as a background process
(daemon) that controls access to the Wi-Fi connection.
You must run this utility after loading the wireless device driver but before starting
wpa_pps,
which uses the utility to perform authentication when creating a new connection.
Here, we provide a sample command for starting the service. The options needed in this case are:
- -D—names the wireless driver
- -t—adds timestamps to debugging messages
- -i—specifies the interface to use (like with wpa_pps)
- -c—provides the path to the configuration file
- -g—provides the path to the global control interface socket
The full list of options can be obtained using the -h option for
wpa_supplicant.
For instance, wpa_supplicant-2.9 -h lists the options supported by version 2.9 of the utility.
The following is an example of starting the WPA supplicant utility for the Marvell Wi-Fi chip:
wpa_supplicant-2.9 -Dqwdi -t -i mrvl_mlan0 -c/var/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf \
-g /var/run/wpa_supplicant_global &
You should then use
waitfor to wait until the global control interface socket has been created before
launching
wpa_pps. To wait for the socket creation, use a command like this:
waitfor /var/run/wpa_supplicant_global 5
where the second argument refers to the number of seconds to wait.