Porting a WiFi Driver

To win this bet I have with Ed I need a WiFi adapter that can do 80211n in the 5GHz band. There aren't a lot of these around and n in 2.4GHz band makes it hard to find adapters with the right support.

I got pair of AC600 generic adapters on ebay for about a tenner, a quick look showed promising Linux support. This indicated I could use one for the bet without too much hassle.

I got a second so I could work on a wireless driver for FreeBSD, what else am I to do with my time?

The adapter is a MediaTek MT7610U device, there is a whole load of information about it on Wikidevi and there are a family of forks of the vendor code on github.

Wikidevi says the MT7610U is similar to the RT28xx series , which are supported by run in FreeBSD. I started last night by taking the run driver, getting it to build as a module, then turning everything off apart from probe, attach and detach.

This is the first time I have tried to port a driver, to help I collated everything I could find written about doing it.

There is straight up FreeBSD stuff:

There are load of little posts where people have ported drivers from FreeBSD to somewhere else:

And there are a load of articles about building wifi drivers for android, these are worth read, but they are worth pointing out:


Reading: Little Brother

I had an argument with some Germans about the pronunciation of WiFi, apparently it is WeeFii using the sounds of wireless and fidelity. They also pronounced HiFi incorrectly, English is a strange language.