RTL8187 drivers for FreeBSD (usb wlan device)

Kevin k at kevinkevin.com
Thu Aug 14 15:08:06 UTC 2008


> 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.


I believe it is the RTL8187L chipset. The actual device is an Alfa Network
"AWUS036H" , product information is
http://dplanet.biz/alfa.com/product_info.php?products_id=342 .





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

I'll look into this -- I believe ndisgen is built into freebsd by default,
however I'm not sure. 


> 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...


Ideally I'd like to utilize a stable port/driver.
/usr/ports/devel/linux-kmod-compat was recommended to me
(http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD/linux_bsd_kld.html) , however I
don't believe this to be a viable option since it was primarily developed to
"wrap" drivers for usb webcams.

Thanks for your suggestions, I will look into the ndisgen progress in any
case. Hopefully USB support is more defined, or will be more defined in the
near future.




More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list