ESP8266 Community Forum

As currently implemented in ESP8266WiFiSTA-WPS.cpp, a call to beginWPSConfig forces the pseudo-function disable_extra4k_at_link_time() to be linked in which eats up 4K of critical RAM that the maintainers worked so hard to make part of the standard core.

This is a big deal because most serious uses of the ESP8266 (e.g. using BearSSL), require significant free RAM and 4K is a big chunk of that.

Despite the security issues, WPS remains by far the easiest way for non-technical users to pair a device with their AP. Is there any hope of making the 4K needed for WPS a dynamic allocation prior to starting WPS or of reclaiming that 4K after WPS finishes?

Reclaiming the 4K after WPS finishes may be more challenging. This would require the ability to dynamically allocate and deallocate memory at runtime, which is not a feature of the ESP8266 platform.