CRDA acts as the udev helper for communication between the kernel and userspace for regulatory compliance. It relies on nl80211 for communication. CRDA is intended to be run only through udev communication from the kernel. The user should never have to run it manually except if debugging udev issues.
CRDA is licensed under the copyleft-next license while wireless-regdb is licensed under the ISC license.
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/mcgrof/crda.git/
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mcgrof/crda.git
You can find official crda releases on the crda release page, older releases can be downloaded through the crda archive
The new regulatory infrastructure went in as of 2.6.28, so CRDA can be used in kernels >= 2.6.28. It is required for 802.11d operation in 2.6.29.
CRDA is no longer needed as of kernel v4.15 since commit 007f6c5e6eb45 (“cfg80211: support loading regulatory database as firmware file”) added support to use the kernel's firmware request API which looks for the firmware on /lib/firmware.
If you do not want to install CRDA on a host, you can simply enable the CONFIG_CFG80211_INTERNAL_REGDB on your kernel. Once enabled you can place the db.txt from the wireless-regdb into net/wireless/db.txt. The downside to using this option is that you will need to rebuild your kernel for any regulatory updates, therefore using CONFIG_CFG80211_INTERNAL_REGDB is not recommended.
If using CONFIG_CFG80211_INTERNAL_REGDB without updating net/wireless/db.txt you'll end up with the static world regulatory domain, so if using CONFIG_CFG80211_INTERNAL_REGDB you should be sure to update net/wireless/db.txt otherwise you may end up spending a lot of time debugging an issue that does not exist. To help with this a patch has been sent to print a warning when a kernel has been built with CONFIG_CFG80211_INTERNAL_REGDB but the database is emtpy. If you happen to also have CONFIG_CFG80211_REG_DEBUG then compiling of the kernel will simply fail.
We use userspace events (uevents) to let the kernel speak to userspace. Below is an example udev rule you can place into your distribution's udev rules directory (usually /etc/udev/rules.d/). Note that most distributions have udev configured with inotify on the udev rules directory, so there is no need to restart udev after adding the new rule.
# Example file, should be put in /etc/udev/rules.d/regulatory.rules KERNEL=="regulatory*", ACTION=="change", SUBSYSTEM=="platform", RUN+="/sbin/crda"
CRDA can be built with gcrypt or openssl support. If using openssl (USE_OPENSSL=1) you can enable dynamic loading of trusted public keys and stuff. Trusted public keys can be put into the directory:
/etc/wireless-regdb/pubkeys
gcrypt support does not support reading public keys dynamically as gcrypt currently lacks a PEM parser.
Linux allows changing regulatory domains in compliance with regulatory restrictions world wide, including the US FCC. In order to achieve this devices always respect their programmed regulatory domain and a country code selection will only enhance regulatory restrictions. This is in accordance with the FCC part 15 country code selection knowledge base publication number 594280. As an example if your device was programmed for operation in the US which allows operation on channels 1-11 on the 2.4 GHz band and you visit Japan which allows operation on channels 1-14 and you change your regulatory domain to JP you will not be able to use channel 12, 13 or 14 (CCK). But if you have a device programmed for operation in Japan and visit the US and you select US as your regulatory domain you will have channel 12-14 disabled.
Userspace applications can request the kernel to change regulatory domains. The following userspace applications currently allow you to do this:
You can use iw from the command line as follows:
iw reg set US
Get the wpa_supplicant (as of 0.6.7) and then add as part of your configuration file a line that has something like this:
COUNTRY=US
This needs to be implemented, but since Network Manager uses wpa_supplicant it should just be a matter of adding a user interface option to let a user select an alpha2 and then adding the country entry into the wpa_supplicant configuration entered.
To debug communication between the kernel and udev you can monitor udev events:
udevadm monitor --environment kernel