documentation on active monitor mode

[ipatch]

opening this issue here because initially i was hopping to airdrop some pictures to my macbook using opendrop with owl. my laptop is running arch linux, and my macbook is a 2013 late model with the below hardware in it,

╰─λ sudo lspci -vnn -d 14e4:                                                                                            0 (0.038s)
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43a0] (rev 03)
        Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device [106b:0134]
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18, IOMMU group 10
        Memory at c1a00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32K]
        Memory at c1800000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M]
        Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [58] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [68] Vendor Specific Information: Len=44 <?>
        Capabilities: [ac] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
        Capabilities: [13c] Device Serial Number [REDACTED]
        Capabilities: [150] Power Budgeting <?>
        Capabilities: [160] Virtual Channel
        Capabilities: [1b0] Latency Tolerance Reporting
        Capabilities: [220] Physical Resizable BAR
        Kernel driver in use: wl
        Kernel modules: bcma, wl

from what i understand, i'm unable to use owl with my hardware because it does not support active monitor mode. i've searched several places to further understand exactly what active is in active monitor mode but not knowing much about networking the searches usually net results with putting a network interface in monitor mode and no mention of active monitor mode unfortunately.

i assume that most if not all wireless hardware could support active monitor mode but it is a limitation of the device driver? i mean this card is the standard wifi/bt 4.0 card that came with macbook and air drop works in macos so i'd assume that macos could be using some form of active monitor mode with this hardware?

searching through this github org i see several projects that operate with broadcom hardware and putting the devices in active monitor mode was described with the rpi 3 blog post.

where would i begin to further understand/read up on active monitor mode. it'd be nice to have source of documentation i can reference in the future and for others who are attempting to use opendrop to understand the difference between monitor mode and active monitor mode.

[M0tix]

AFAIK, Active monitoring mode is the ability to ACK incoming Unicast Packets. You can test it with
sudo iw <device> set monitor active , if it doesnt work, it returns w command failed operation not supported (-95).
Some more information, and chipsets supporting active, can be found here: morrownr/USB-WiFi#73

[ghost]

Why can't you inject packets with IEEE80211_RADIOTAP_F_TX_NOACK ?

https://docs.kernel.org/networking/mac80211-injection.html

Are there no measures for packet loss in the protocol?