Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2012 16:07:34 +0100 From: nvangogh <nvangoghs@gmail.com> To: freebsd-drivers@freebsd.org Subject: Precisely what hardware information is required? Message-ID: <50018B36.4000207@gmail.com>
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Hello, I am a novice as far as FreeBSD is concerned. However, I am interested in device driver development methodology and code. My question relates specifically to a particular wireless chipset for wifi. There is currently no device driver available under FreeBSD for the RTL 8191 SE chipset. Realtek have a web page explaining the features of the chip in general terms. There is source code available for certain linux distributions. Now I understand that it would be impossible to build such source code on FreeBSD. However, according to the documentation, the source code is divided into two parts i.e : 1. Firmware for the chip. There is a folder that contains 7 small files (on average 70kb) and they end with .bin.fw - I believe that these are the files containing assembly code for the chipset. How would one go about writing such code from scratch, with only general information about the driver? Would it be necessary to have technical information such as the number of registers in the chipset and eg how they interact? Or Is there a generic codebase of 'firmware' that will work with most wifi chipsets? What does the firmware actually do? 2. Source code. This is written in c. At this stage I have no questions about it. Kind Regards
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