Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL

I recently wanted to do point-to-point Wi-Fi for transferring some data but apparently support for the ad-hoc IBSS mode wasn't available on my MT7925. Wi-Fi Aware is completely new to me and didn't come up while searching on the topic at all. I can't find anything about using it on Linux now either. Anybody have any references on its support?

There's a single kernel commit referencing Wi-Fi Aware from 2023 [0]. iw supposedly supports a few commands pertaining to it [1].

  [0] https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?h=v6.14&id=9b89495e479c5fedbf3f2eca4f1c4e9dd481265e
  [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53594406/implementing-a-wifi-aware-application-outside-android

Adhoc was the coolest thing, I still miss it. One day in 2002-ish, I was showing a friend some photos on my laptop and noticed a crowd had gathered over my shoulder, and there simply wasn't enough room for everyone to get a good view.

"Fire up adhoc, set it to this ssid, vnc to this address"

Two minutes later, my photos are on five screens around the coffee shop and everyone can see.

Adhoc just worked, and that's more than I can say for a great many things before or since.

What stops you from using it today? A wiki claims it is just 3 commands and IP configuration:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ad-hoc_networking#Manual_me...