Hey hey !

This is my first post to document my journey for Google Summer of Code 2025.

After going through the different organisations selected to participate in GSOC 2025, Freifunk peaked my interest (I was just coming back from a trip to Germany and discovered about them during my trip) with a special mention for the project proposed by Javier Jorge titled : Adding Wi-Fi Support to QEMU Simulations in LibreMesh.

Linux, QEMU, OpenWrt, all that on a background of a distributed system, bundled in one project ? Every one of my subjects of predilection all in one project : that’s my luck !

I was already familiar with different mesh projects such as Meshtastic (lora based mesh network) and obviously heard about Guifi.net but it was my first time hearing about LibreMesh, and I must say I find it a fantastic project and I hope to see it deployed in Paris very soon ! Something like “panamesh” would sound great ? First I need to convince my lora peers!

🧠 About the Project

The idea is to bring Wi-Fi virtualization capabilities to LibreMesh through QEMU, using the Linux kernel module mac80211_hwsim. This would allow for:

  • Lighter, faster, and more flexible testing (no need to setup physical hardware anymore)
  • Simulating different kinds of topology
  • Introducing controlled packet loss and experimentating on it
  • Extension of this could include : roaming simulation, adding (virtually) physical obstacle and much more.

I believe this could be really interesting for LibreMesh and could lead to some interesting experimentations !

🔍 Useful Reads

Here are a few resources I found particularly interesting while researching for this project:

Thanks for reading! I’ll be updating this blog as I progress through — no matter how it ends up I will have learned a lot.