Re: BCM43224 driver

[neitzel%hackett.marshlabs.gaertner.de@localhost (Martin Neitzel)]

Hi John,

> I want to know if there is any chance to enable Broadcom BCM 43224 in netbsd.
> What driver (even similar driver) i could use for this.

congrats on switching from text/html to text/plain.  That makes
your mails readable for me (I'm using mail(1) from base) and deserves
a reply.

Most chapter 4 man pages for the various drivers explicitly list
the chips and product brand names supported by the driver.

NetBSD's "man -k" keyword search is now full-text based, and that makes
it much easier to search for drivers or the stat of support.
On NetBSD-8-stable, I get these results:

	man -k 43224	==> nothing
	man -k bmc	==> a single false hit ("bcms" in dhcp-options(5))
	man -k braodcom	==> half a dozen broadcom network drivers

Out of the latter, bwi(4) appears to be the closest candidate, but
not a really good match for your hardware.  It lists:

HARDWARE
     The following cards are among those supported by the bwi driver:

           Card                     Chip       Bus         Standard
           Buffalo WLI-CB-G54       BCM4306    CardBus     b/g
           Buffalo WLI3-CB-G54L     BCM4318    CardBus     b/g
           Buffalo WLI-PCI-G54S     BCM4306    PCI         b/g
           Dell Wireless 1370       BCM4318    Mini PCI    b/g
           Dell Wireless 1470       BCM4318    Mini PCI    b/g
           Dell Truemobile 1400     BCM4309    Mini PCI    b/g
           Dell Latitude D505       BCM4306    PCI         b/g
           Apple AirPort Extreme                           b/g

Alas, the "43224" doesn't appear to be closely related to this 43xy chip
family.

That's the general idea to look for a driver.  It also makes sense
to "man -k" for product or model names.  You *might* be more lucky
with NetBSD-9 or -current, I didn't check these.

Usually, NetBSD will auto-detect all hardware which it supports.
So don't expect too much.  These "man -k" checks are best before
you invest in new hardware to see wether it would be supported.

						Martin Neitzel