Subject: USB Realtek 8187?
To: None <tech-net@netbsd.org>
From: Stephen Borrill <netbsd@precedence.co.uk>
List: tech-net
Date: 12/22/2006 13:17:23
I've just been given a laptop by our OEM supplier, but the wireless is an 
internal USB-linked device and is not supported by -current. It's a 
Realtek (0x0dba) RTL8187 (0x8187). Looking at Realtek's Linux driver 
(which has the interesting comment "some ideas might be derived from David 
Young rtl8180 netbsd driver." led me to suspect that something based on 
rtw(4) might be the right driver (the 8187 seems to be an 8180 with USB). 
However, rtw(4) currently only has pci and cardbus attachment code at 
present (and the man page suggests that while most PCI devices will 
attached most are not able to transmit).

I don't really know anything about writing/porting drivers, but I figured 
it might be worth a try looking at writing usb attachment code for the rtw 
driver). However, the drivers in dev/usb/if_* seem to be complete drivers 
rather than just attachment code for things in dev/ic even where there's 
potentially a similar driver in dev/pci (e.g. dev/usb/if_ural.c and 
dev/pci/if_ral_pci.c). This leads me to think that it's not as simple as 
I'd hoped :-)

I've got a test machine here and I'm willing to pay money for a working 
driver if it's turned around quickly.

-- 
Stephen