illumos gate

a similar problem is reported by Olivier Nicaise in his EAP-TTLS project:

"When wpa_supplicant is run as a service but without the daemon option, all goes
well. At least for one minute : the library used to start other services on Solaris will
shutdown any service that doesn’t daemonize itsell. When launching wpa supplicant
as a daemon at this point doesn’t work anymore, wpa supplicant doesn’t receive
driver’s events anymore. Indeed the problem comes from the fact that when a pro-
cess daemonize itself on Solaris, the system call f ork is used. This system call has
as side effect to close any door open inside the child process. Since it is the child
process that will be kept running, the door is closed and wpa supplicant doesn’t
receive the events anymore. The way to correct this is to daemonize wpa supplicant
before opening the door, and so, before the driver’s initialization."

Additional info here:
dladm_wlan_wpa_set_wpa
"Enables or disables WPA in the driver for a specified WiFi link.
If on is B_TRUE, the WPA service is enabled.
If on is B_FALSE, the WPA service is disabled.

dladm_wlan_wpa_set_wpa() tells the driver when the WPA daemon is willing
to handle incoming WPA traffic on a particular link (e.g., so that the
driver will make door upcalls). The WPA daemon calls this API whenever a
WPA-secured link is connected or disconnected. The behavior of other
WPA APIs are unaffected by enabling or disabling WPA."