'wpa_supplicant -D nl80211 -W' hangs with some Intel cards

[Paul Donohue]

init_wpa_supplicant() in /etc/wpa_supplicant/functions.sh runs wpa_supplicant with the -W option, which causes it to wait for wpa_cli to attach. init_wpa_supplicant() then attaches wpa_cli to wpa_supplicant.

When the nl80211 driver is used with some Intel cards, wpa_supplicant automatically defines a second p2p_dev_${WPA_IFACE} interface. If multiple interfaces are defined in wpa_supplicant, then wpa_supplicant will wait for multiple wpa_cli instances to attach. Since init_wpa_supplicant() only attaches a single wpa_cli process, this causes wpa_supplicant to hang, which ultimately leads to a timeout and causes interface configuration to fail.

This has been fixed upstream: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2015-December/034410.html
And also in Debian: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833402

However, the updated wpa_supplicant has not made it to Ubuntu (not even Zesty), and the "-m ''" workaround mentioned in the mailing list thread associated with the upstream fix does not work with the version of wpa_supplicant that comes with Ubuntu.

Could the P2P patches that were merged into Debian be merged into Ubuntu?

[Andrej Shadura (andrew.sh)]

I understand this bug will be fixed when Marc rebased Ubuntu wpa package on top of the Debian's.

[Paul Donohue (s-launchpad-paulsd-com)]

This is still broken in Artful, but is fixed in Bionic.