20070525

Found cheap SDIO 802.11b card

At CompUSA today I found a cheap 802.11b SDIO card. This card is labeled as a Kodak Camera wireless card, but has a Marvell 8686 lurking under the hood. I've seen this card before, but it was $100. Today it was $20, which was cheap enough to take a flier on. This card should come in handy when I get around to implementing an SDIO stack for the SD/MMC stack that is in FreeBSD right now. I don't know if there's any information available for this card, and I've seen indications that there might not be, but at the very least I have a card that I can parse the CIS from and do other things in preparation. OpenBSD has a partially reverse engineered driver for a PCI cousin of this card that might have some clues, but I doubt I'll find anything useful for it.

But playing with this card will have to wait until I can get the simple memory cards working with the sdh driver, or the sdmmc stuff. I need to get the ZyDas ZD1211 driver going first.

I also found a TRENDnet wireless card based on the RTL8187B chipset. Linux driver, a couple of different ones, are available. But it uses some non-standard 802.11 code, so decoding it might be interesting. It is way down in the queue at the moment, since I have no documentation for it and no known working driver. At least with the ZD1211, I have two known working drivers from which to crib.

20070524

SD/MMC

There's another SD/MMC stack for FreeBSD that's been posted. It was written by Akihiko GOTANDA-san using the SD simplified specifications. It works well for the Ricoh based parts, but fails to attach to my TI based parts. It doesn't have the hacks necessary to put the TI parts into standards conforming mode either, but even with those added there are some problems. This driver was recently announced in the mobile@ mailing list.

This joins my SD/MMC stack that I wrote for the Atmel AT91RM9200 port. Andrea Bittau also has written a 'sdh' driver that plugs into my stack. It works with Ricoh parts, but not TI parts either, but it gets closer than Gotanda-san's driver. It was announced a while ago in the mobile@ mailing list.

And there was much interest in my SD/MMC card talk at BSDcan! I'm glad to see more interest here.

ZyDas usb stick update

After my last entry, I noticed that Linux, OpenBSD and hps' new stack all have ZyDas drivers, at least for the ZD1211 and ZD1211B. hps' zyd driver appears to be a relatively recent port to his new stack.

I have the OpenBSD one builing on FreeBSD's current USB stack. I still need it for other reasons, and a MFC of HPS' stack will never happen, so if we want to support it in 6.x, we'll need one for the old stack.

I get to the part where the driver tires to setup the MAC with the RF specific register values when I get a panic. I've not had the time to debug it further, but hope to find that time soon.

My experiences with BSDcan showed that I needed both USB and CardBus wireless working...

20070523

Ativa Wireless G Network Adapter

I stopped by Office Depot today to buy a wireless usb card. I wound up getting the rather generic sounding Ativa Wireless G USB network card. This turns out to be a rebadged Belkin F5D7050 v4000 wireless card. This has the ZyDas ZD1211 chipset in it. This is a fairly popular chipset to judge by ebay (where it is just about the only chipset advertised).

There's a Linux driver. Well, there are two. One that was basically binary only that was written by ZyDas, and another that was a rewrite by the community. I'll have to see if there's one for FreeBSD :-)

20070522

eHome Cardbus card

Looks like my run of luck with CardBus cards has reached an end.

I came home with an eHome card, but it is a Marvel part for which little documentation can be found on the web. Of course, if you have info on the 88W8310 part used in this CardBus card, please let me know. This is H/W REV A1, in case they have multiple versions of the EH101.

20070519

BSDcan 2007

I had an absolute blast at BSDcan 2007.

There's more buzz this year about embedding FreeBSD than there has been in prior years. I believe that we're building momentum in this space.

There were a number of cool talks about developments in FreeBSD, which you can see at the bsdcan web site.

My talk on SD/MMC cards was well recieved. The slides are available now. This contains an overview of the various flavors of SD/MMC card.

My talk on the Atmel AT91RM9200 slides are also available, as are my 2000 talk on NEWCARD as a paper or as MagicPoint slides, and the follow on paper on ISA vs PCI interrupt dispatch in the PC Card code I gave in 2002.

I've had a chance to also hack on the cardbus resource allocation code a bit while here. There's still something screwy going on with it, but I'm having trouble locating the oddness.

I had hoped to collect some of the older SD/MMC cards while at this conference. However, nobody had any cards that I was able to take with me. I did have a few of them that I was able to try out on my Atmel AT91RM9200 board and fix minor timing issues with the stack (the older ones are a little slower and needed slightly longer timeouts).

The best part is seeing everybody again from past years. It is good to see the community growing. It is also good to see many people form companies that have been designing in FreeBSD into their products for years. These companies have also started to fund the chances necessary for them to run FreeBSD in different embedded platforms (both i386 based, as well as powerpc and mips based hardware was talked about).

There's also been some buzz about creating a FreeBSD community summit to complement the FreeBSD developers summit. A place where developers, engineers from companies using the products and users could get together and discuss how to drive FreeBSD development as well as ways to facilitate integration of changes that companies have developed for FreeBSD that they desire to give back to the FreeBSD project.

It was also good to see developers from the sister BSD projects. Renewing the personal ties to the people in these sister projects is good for the BSD ecosystem, and we need to do more of them.

That's all for now. I hope to post links to videos from my talks shortly (or find some way to put them on you tube, if they are short enough).

see everybody next year!

All in all, a very exciting BSDcan.

20070513

FreeBSD SD/MMC stack talk

My talk for BSDCan 2007 on the FreeBSD SD/MMC stack is going nicely. The basics are done, and now I'm into the hard part of the talk: actually documenting the dataflow and interfaces between layers. This is the part of the talk that will be the call to arms: more work needs to be done to add support for all the latest SD/MMC goodies.

I'll post a pointer here once I've finished the talk to my slides with notes. Maybe people here can find any silly errors in them before the question and answer session of my talk brings them up. I'll also report on the status of the Standard SD Host Adapter driver that's been written, but not yet committed to current yet. The talk also gives a lot of background for these devices, and has a number of pointers to publicly available documents that thankfully nearly totally document all aspects of SD/MMC. The exceptions being mainly the DRM features of SD and the secure MMC extensions.

20070508

FreeBSD wireless picture frame

Tonight I finished a present for my wife. A wireless picture frame based on FreeBSD.

The frame is running on an old Sony VAIO PCG-505TS that I had from many years ago. Its battery is nearly shot, good only now for powering the BIOS battery. However, I put in a solid state disk and a subset of FreeBSD. It now displays pictures from a directory on our home network in rotation.

The hardest part turned out to be how to securely mount the laptop into the picture frame.

I'll describe the software that I used in the coming days. For now, just this little teaser.