how to encourage a wireless driver to exist?

Arthur Chance freebsd at qeng-ho.org
Tue Aug 19 15:30:00 UTC 2014


On 17/08/2014 09:53, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 03:24:27PM +1000, dbc wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have a new laptop which I'm well sick of having to run linux on. Is there
>> a way to encourage someone to write a driver for intel 7260 wifi card?
>
> You might want to ask on the freebsd-wireless list. But I think Cedric Gross
> is working on it.
>
>> I am a C programmer, and I would be willing to volunteer time, but I don't
>> know how useful I will be with neither driver writing nor wifi protocol nor
>> FreeBSD development process experience. Still, if anyone would point me in
>> the right direction I would happily give it a shot. Where can this stuff be
>> learnt? I also see that linux drivers exist, but I'm not sure about legal
>> problems when copying from those.
>
> There is a github repo; https://github.com/KreizIT/FreeBSD-IWN
>
> The Linux and FreeBSD kernels are quite different internally. So just copying
> code would be useless.
>
> And Linux kernel code is under the GPL, which AFAIK is not acceptable in the
> FreeBSD base system.
>
> What is usually done is study how the Linux driver works, and re-implement it
> in the way FreeBSD drivers are written. You can study existing drivers as
> references. You should consider joining the freebsd-hackers list if you start
> working on FreeBSD code.
>
> The standard book about the internals of FreeBSD is;
>
>      Marshall Kirk McKusick, George V. Neville-Neil
>      The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System.
>      Boston, Mass. : Addison-Wesley, 2004. ISBN 0-201-70245-2

I would add this book specifically about FBSD device drivers

http://www.nostarch.com/bsddrivers.htm

> Marshall Kirk McKusick teaches courses about the internals of FreeBSD. IIRC
> you can order videos of them online.
>
> See also
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bibliography-osinternals.html
>
>> Or, while I probably couldn't afford to fund it entirely myself, is there a
>> way I could chip into a pot to help fund someone with more experience to at
>> least make a start on it?
>
> You can always make a donation; https://www.freebsd.org/donations/
>
> Roland
>



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