Re: How difficult would it be to port the ral driver from FreeBSD?

[Kyle Butt <kylebutt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/15/05, Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 12:01:07AM -0600, Kyle Butt wrote:
> > In googling I saw someone mentioned that the
> > difficulty lie in the fact that the 802.11 stack had
> > changed from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD current,
> 
> Those changes shouldn't affect most parts of the drivers,
> I think our stack is still more similiar to OpenBSD than to
> FreeBSD current.
> 
> > and I know that the networking stack has been
> > under a lot of work recently, especially as work
> > has been done to make it MP-clean. How different
> 
> The network stack changes are very small, basically just the
> different ALTQ API.
> 
> > are the interfaces, and How much would transfer
> > over. I've never worked on device drivers before,
> > but I'm a fair C programmer, and I have some time
> > on my hands. I'm willing to do most of the work if
> > someone is willing to point me in the right direction
> > and answer some questions.
> 
> The biggest problem with porting from NetBSD / OpenBSD
> is the different config mechanism (newbus vs. autoconf)
> and the difference in the bus_dma abstraction. I don't
> know if ral was ported to FreeBSD, if so, it should be
> very easy to get to DragonFly as well.
> 
> Joerg
> 

Good, I'll get net access on Wednesday (I just moved), 
and I'll get the drivers then from FreeBSD and OpenBSD, 
and I'll use them as a reference to get started. If I have 
any questions, I'll ask the list, but If the API's haven't 
changed much, then I don't think the task is beyond me.

Kyle.