Wi-Fi P2P support in Plasma

Brainstorm
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The idea is to have a way to initiate P2P scans and establish connections between peers. For instance, P2P interactions could be done in the same fashion as Bluetooth. Another is to implement Miracast support in Plasma to either cast the current screen to a device or stream a remote to the desktop. Work is underway in an MR for NetworkManagerQt to provide support in that framework with the intent to extend Plasma’s functionalities.

Prior discussions include Built-in Miracast support, Screen sharing support for KDE’s virtual desktop and KDE Miracast Wi-Fi Display Support.

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@yakoyakoyokuyoku, this would be superb! Are you thinking of leveraging (gosh, I sound like an LLM) Plasma’s existent “hotspot” functionality to have all devices act as APs?

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I feel like this could only work if there was an easy way for NetworkManager or whatever it is that manages network connections to be able to do 2 different WiFi connections on separate bands via the same WiFi device. My understanding is that this is one of the main issues why Miracast is not easy to implement on Linux

Also, I tried to click on that MR for NetworkManagerQt link in your post, but it doesn’t take me anywhere…

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@9man, are you referring to something like:

If not, have you a URI to an issue or MR/PR discussing this?

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Yeah, though there’s the catch that when a P2P device isn’t a group owner but a client then it should act as an station interface.

I think that what you’re looking for is that the device should support interface combinations, I’ve yet to discover how the kernel decides that. The following commands should show all the features your interfaces support, you can look up combinations via search or grep.

$ iw phy
$ iw dev

I swear I’ve pasted the link while editing that. Regardless, look up for the merge request in frameworks/networkmanager-qt KDE Invent repo. It seems that Discourse isn’t letting me use links, I don’t know.

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Something like that yes. But in general, much like how it should be possible to open a hotspot while still connected to wifi (by utilizing separate bands, which most WiFi cards now support)… it should also be possible to connect to 2 or more wifi connections via separate bands.

I do not. I remember searching about this a long time ago somewhere, can’t remember where, and the conclusion was that getting it to work on Linux was not trivial. However, maybe things are different now?

In my case my wifi device certainly supports 2 bands. But how networkmanager (or whatever the backend tool for handling wifi) handles it is the question, if I understand correctly. As you may have noticed, by default it would only let you connect to one wifi SSID at a time. This is the expected behaviour by regular users of course, but it’s not very clear how to get it to work with two.

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