No AWDL interface: AirDrop, Sidecar and Continuity Camera cannot work #2

openarea:wifiseverity:mediumfound-by:featuretestkind:feature

watchthelight 2026-10-18

ifconfig awdl0 finds no interface. macOS uses AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link) for AirDrop, Sidecar, Continuity Camera over Wi-Fi and Universal Control. The native front end provides only the infrastructure interface.

The feasibility spike for AWDL on the MT7925 is phase C of the Wi-Fi plan. This issue tracks the missing capability; the guided part of the feature test records which Continuity features fail because of it.

Tested on Lenovo Legion 5 15IAX10, MT7925, macOS 26.7.1 (25G241). Evidence: project-legion evidence/native/featuretest-2026-10-18/A/net.awdl.txt.

watchthelight 2026-10-31

Two new things for this one, written up in https://github.com/watchthelight-labs/research/blob/main/scout/mt7925-wifi-native/2026-10-31.md

owly (MIT) lists the MT7925 as working both ways with an iPhone on Linux, in shared mode on channel 44, and ships iOS 26 captures from that card. So the radio and firmware can do AWDL. Their notes say injected frames leave at most one every 2.5 ms and the station stops receiving after a monitor interface is removed, which we would probably hit too. The MT7927 does not work there, and the MT7921/7922 only in an exclusive mode.
RTL8814Native now creates awdl0 on 25G241 and gets IO80211AWDLPeerManager through configure and enableAWDL. It has no peer on the air yet, so nothing past the setup is confirmed. Its ioctl table shows which setters the manager treats as fatal.

Neither makes AirDrop work here. They are what to compare against when we start on awdl0. Credits are in the README: a5b3487

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