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.
Funny you mention SDIO. I used to have a Bluetooth SDIO card from Palm. Let it go for $15 some years ago.
ReplyDeleteI seriously doubt anyone could make that work with FreeBSD, thou :)
The RTL8187B does have a Linux driver; for some reason, though, it didn't recognize my RTL8187B (it's an onboard NIC in a laptop (yes, they used a USB device for an onboard NIC, go Toshiba)).
ReplyDeleteYes, linux drive 'rtl8187' does on most systems, though ndiswrapper will always work. You should hack that RTL8187B RTL8187B_WLAN_Adapter for freeBSD though, BSD is in much need for more drivers.
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