Porting a 5.3 USB WLAN driver to 7.1

patrick gibblertron at gmail.com
Mon Feb 16 23:14:07 PST 2009


I'm doing my best to port a driver (atuwi) for a Linksys WUSB11v2.8
driver that was written for FreeBSD 5.x to 7.1, but as I'm not a
kernel hacker by any means, I'm having a few problems. I've managed to
update Daan Vreeken's atuwi so that it compiles and loads, but I
haven't yet got it to connect to my wireless network. When I load
driver, I get a couple warnings:

atuwi0: WARNING: using obsoleted if_watchdog interface
atuwi0: WARNING: using obsoleted IFF_NEEDSGIANT flag

I've Googled both messages, but haven't found any discussion on when
these were obsoleted and what you're supposed to do instead. My
ifconfig status shows up as:

atuwi0: flags=108802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,NEEDSGIANT> metric 0 mtu 1500
	ether 00:0c:41:5a:48:5f
	inet 10.0.42.223 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.42.255
	maclabel ?biba,?lomac,?mls,?sebsd
	media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect
	status: no carrier
	vlan: 0 parent interface: <none>
ifconfig: unable to get channel information
	ssid "Air Mousey"

I notice that "status" shows up as "no carrier", and I'm not sure what
exactly that means and why it's unable to get any "channel
information". I also notice question marks in the "maclabel" line, and
I suspect that might be indicative of a problem. My biggest problem is
that I can't find any documentation on the "right" way to structure
such a driver. I've looked at other if_xxxx drivers in the usb/
folder, but each does its thing in its own way.

Both OpenBSD and NetBSD adopted Daan's atuwi driver and have had it
running for a while, but unfortunately no one in the FreeBSD world
took it on. If anyone has any insight or can point me in the right
direction, I'd be greatly appreciative.

Thanks,

Patrick


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