RTL8187 drivers for FreeBSD (usb wlan device)

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Kevin wrote:

> I'm curious about getting my RTL8187 WLAN Usb device to work under freebsd.
> Has anyone got a rtl8187 based wlan stick working with freebsd?

Be aware that the RTL8187, RTL8187B and RTL8187L are all different 
chipsets.  I believe Linux has two drivers for them, one driver covers two 
chips.

> As far I know ndisgen won't work because it does not support usb devices.
> When I install the windows drivers via ndisgen , there are kernel error
> messages reported. FreeBSD detects the device when I initially plug it in,
> but nothing more becomes of that.

Some work on supporting USB under NDIS has been done, it might be worth 
investigating just how far from completion it is.

> There are debian / linux drivers available for this device, however I know
> nothing about porting linux drivers to FreeBSD, nor do I really want to wipe
> my laptop and put debian on it ;)

Linux drivers are often hard to port, purely because they are badly 
documented and often use "magic" values which may need to be different 
under FreeBSD.  I looked at the code a little while starting my own 
RTL8087B driver, but ended up preferring to monitor how Windows talked to 
the device.  Note, however, that my driver is nowhere near finished 
(doesn't even have code to send/receive yet), so there's no point me 
sending it to you...

Gavin