Precisely what hardware information is required?

[nvangogh]

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