Subject: Re: Driver for the Broadcomm Airforce One wireless device???
To: Brian Buhrow <buhrow@lothlorien.nfbcal.org>
From: Jonathan A. Kollasch <jakllsch@kollasch.net>
List: port-i386
Date: 11/04/2006 17:09:56
--juZjCTNxrMaZdGZC
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 10:53:12PM -0800, Brian Buhrow wrote:
> 	Hello folks.  I decided to try booting the BETA of NetBSD-4 on my
> wife's Dell Latitude D610 to see what devices worked and which ones didn'=
t.
>=20
> The good news is that most things seem to work, the USB, the disk drive,
> the onboard Broadcom Gigabit ethernet, and the integrated sound chip.
> 	The two big things that don't seem to work are the Broadcom wireless
> device, see below, and the Texas Instruments cardbus bridges.  I'm using
> the boot-com.iso cdrom image from the ftp site, so perhaps the cardbus
> bridges are in the full kernel and if I actually installed the OS on the
> hard drive, they would work.  However, in this demo mode, I can't tell if

Often (at least in the past) a _LAPTOP variant kernel will work in these
cases.

> the integrated bluetooth device works in NetBSD-4 because I suspect it's
> logically behind one of the non-working cardbus bridges.

Usually it's on a USB port.  In any case a INSTALL kernel would not have
BT support.

>=20
> 	However, more importantly, the Broadcom AirForce One wireless chip
> built into this laptop appears to have no driver, if Google is any guide.
> Does anyone know if there is a way to use the wireless on this laptop with
> NetBSD?  There were some pages in my  Google search which intimated that =
it
> might be possible to use Windows NDIS drivers with NetBSD to get the
> wireless fired up, but I'm a bit unclear how to do this, and how the NDIS
> support works in NetBSD-4, if it works at all, and what steps are necessa=
ry
> to use it.

ndis(4)

This being Broadcom, I don't expect a native driver any time soon.

>=20
> 	Has anyone else run across this wireless device in their laptop, and,
> if so, what have they done to get around it or make it work?

If the BIOS doesn't force you to use Dell-branded wireless products,
you might be able to replace it with a Ralink or Atheros MiniPCI card.

> -thanks
> -Brian
>=20
> vendor 0x14e4 product 0x4318 (miscellaneous network, revision 0x02) at pc=
i3 dev
> 3 function 0 not configured
>=20

	Jonathan Kollasch

--juZjCTNxrMaZdGZC
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (NetBSD)

iD4DBQFFTR3EOjx1ye3hmokRAl2jAJ9Wvug/C3XV5GhcH8kHIlfPJ166gACXdBxJ
vMV8KB44XY9HLggqAsUj/w==
=zblW
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--juZjCTNxrMaZdGZC--