Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Oh god, so much wireless hardware..

Since I've started doing wireless development, people seem to be sending me more and more hardware. (I've also bought some stuff off of ebay too, so I'm partially to blame for this. :-)

So there's this group of developers over in Europe/Russia who have been busy porting FreeBSD to a variety of wireless devices, but their work hasn't made it into the main FreeBSD tree (or been published at all in any public way.) I've been liaising with Aleksandr Rybalko to push their work into -HEAD in time for FreeBSD-9.0.

So far this has included:

  • Support for the Ralink RT305x MIPS SoC, with initial peripheral support;
  • nvram2env, a way of importing the environment from various bootloaders (eg uboot) into the kernel environment;
  • geom_map, a GEOM module which describes the flash layout for fixed flash partitioning schemes (again like uboot, but it can be used for anything.)
There's a few other things coming up soon, such as support for one of the Broadcom MIPS SoCs, further peripheral support for the RT305x (including the embedded wireless MAC/radio) and other bits and pieces which will prove to be useful.

It's been a pleasure working with them

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