Fwd: Wireless Extensions and "no such device" output from stardard ioctl calls

[Joe]

Good morning, I am having some issues using wpa_supplicant and I am
not sure if the problem lies with the wireless extensions or the
supplicant itself (or even the driver itself), so if anyone could help
me clarify where the problem may lie it would be helpful.

First of all, I get the following errors on startup:

ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWMODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIWRANGE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFINDEX]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: No such device
WEXT auth param 7 value 0x0 - ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: No such device
WEXT auth param 5 value 0x0 - ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: No such device
WEXT auth param 4 value 0x0 - ioctl[SIOCSIWAP]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
Initializing interface 'wl0' conf
'/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf' driver 'default'
ctrl_interface 'N/A' bridge 'N/A'
Configuration file '/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf' ->
'/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf'
Reading configuration file '/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf'

 What do the "no such device" errors mean and is it being generated by
the extensions or by wpa_supplicant? I grepped around the supplicant
code and didn't find the string, but that does not mean the supplicant
didn't just take the output passed up from the extentsions. I didn't
find the string in /net/core/wireless.c either.  What is going on at
this stage of whatever initialization process is happening? Again, I'd
rather read docs if they exist so if there's some accessible
documentation that I somehow overlooked, please direct me and accept
my apologies.

Does this mean that the driver itself looks like it is absent, hence,
"no such device" or is it that specific ioctl that has questionable
support? Some of these are not wireless specific such as SIOCGIFFLAGS
so I do not know what to think.

Thanks in advance.