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

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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