How to enable Wifi with yocto

If you want to have WiFi integrated with yocto root filesystem, follow below mentioned steps,

Open file, meta-mylayer/images/mydistro-image.bb and add below mentioned line,

DISTRO_FEATURES += "wifi"

This will add wifi into the root filesystem but unless you have a proper network manager and UI, you will not be able to connect to internet.

So, we will follow manual configuration, so we can connect without network manager,

We will need to change the wpa-supplicant.conf file as below, by modifying poky/meta/recipes-connectivity/wpa-supplicant/wpa-supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf-sane

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
update_config=1

network={
        ssid="MYSSID"
        psk="MY-SECURE-PASSKEY"
        proto=RSN
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Compile, the rootfs image “bitbake mydistro-image” which will integrate this conf file into rootfs at /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Now, we will need to do following things manually to get the internet working properly, [ If you want to Skip all of this manual procedure and want to start WiFi on yocto during boot time refer to this article ]

To Start WPA Supplicant, use below command on terminal,

$ wpa_supplicant -Dnl80211 -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

If you now connected with WiFi, but wlan0 still not have IP Assigned,

$ ifconfig wlan0 192.168.X.XXX

Here it depends on whether you use 192.168.1.150 or 192.168.0.150 ( 150 is just example, you can use any IP ), this will assign IP address to wlan0 and you should be able to ping to the router, as

$ ping 192.168.1.1

If this works and you are not able to ping to “google.com” , check with “route -n” if gateway has IP assinged, if not use following command,

$ route add default gw 192.168.1.1

Where we assume, 192.168.1.1 is your gateway IP,

Now you should have “ping google.com” working. 🙂 Do share this article if helps you.

Alternatively , you can also enable WiFi by appending conf/local.config as,

IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " wpa-supplicant wireless-tools dhcp-client linux-firmware"