RT2790 Wireless miniCard - ral not working on Eee Box

[Sam Leffler]

Alexander Sack wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 4:36 PM, Sam Leffler <sam at freebsd.org> wrote:
>   
>> Alexander Sack wrote:
>>     
>>> Moving this to freebsd-drivers since it is NOW definitely a driver
>>> issue....
>>>
>>> Actually I do see the rt2x00 open source project for Linux which I
>>> suppose will support this chipset in time.  I had the impression the
>>> ral driver was based off OpenBSD (I believe that is mentioned in the
>>> man page).
>>>
>>> I'm wondering if the rt2x00 stack would be beneficial to FreeBSD in
>>> order to keep in sync with the development being done.  Perhaps I'm
>>> not in the know....but I thought I would ask to learn.
>>>
>>>       
>> If this is an 11n part then it's likely based on a 2860 part and there
>> currently is no driver for freebsd.  I have a partly finished driver for
>> HEAD but no time.  Also the info we received from ralink is incomplete and
>> they don't answer queries.
>>     
>
> Sam, thanks for the heads up.  Yes it is, its a 11n minicard.   Btw,
> I'm a happy user of I believe some of the ath work you've done in the
> past so thanks!  :D!
>   

"11n" may be misleading here; the 2661 parts are described as MIMO and 
sometimes marketed as pre-11n but are not capable of 802.11n as 
currently spec'd.  The PCI id you stated previously doesn't match any of 
the ones I know are 2860-based.

> May I ask how far along are you?  And if this is something you can
> hand over to someone else to finish?  I was going to ask ralink for a
> spec sheet in an attempt to see if something could be done.  I
> *thought* they were open source friendly?
>   

I can hand the driver over to someone (I offered it to several 
developers already).  I stopped when I went to add WME support and hit 
issues w/ apparent DMA alignment requirements.  I asked Ralink to 
clarify the datasheet they provided (which says nothing) but they have 
not responded to that question or other critical questions we need 
answers to for 11n and multi-bss support.

> Btw, about my other point, so does FreeBSD have a separate ralink
> stack from the rt2x00 project? (I haven't peeked at the source yet, I
> was hoping perhaps it had support for the card and could be ported
> over, etc.).
>
>   
We don't need a separate stack; we have a common 802.11 framework that 
drivers share.  This makes our drivers usually 1/4th - 1/10'th the size 
of other systems.

    Sam