Status of wireless driver development for Raspberry Pi?

[John F Carr]

According to a page that hasn't been updated for a while (https://wiki.freebsd.org/SDIO) work is in progress on Broadcom wireless drivers for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4. I'm supposed to start by building the GENERIC-MMCCAM kernel. A CAM device will then appear which I can then use camcontrol to talk to. I built the kernel and booted it on my Pi 3B+, which has a Broadcom 43455/6 according to Linux. All camcontrol finds is the mini SD card. I see only one call to sdhci_init_slot in bcm2835_sdhost.c so maybe that's the problem. It supports exactly one SDIO device, a memory card.

Any thoughts? Is it worth thinking about the wireless chip or is it just too much work?

# camcontrol devlist
<SDHC SC16G 8.0 SN 54B43C20 MFG 08/2018 > at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,sdda0)
# camcontrol devlist -v
scbus0 on sdhci_slot0 bus 0:
<SDHC SC16G 8.0 SN 54B43C20 MFG 08/2018 > at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,sdda0)
scbus-1 on xpt0 bus 0:
<> at scbus-1 target -1 lun ffffffff (xpt0)

[Ronald Klop]

Post by John F Carr
According to a page that hasn't been updated for a while (https://wiki.freebsd.org/SDIO) work is in progress on Broadcom wireless drivers for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4. I'm supposed to start by building the GENERIC-MMCCAM kernel. A CAM device will then appear which I can then use camcontrol to talk to. I built the kernel and booted it on my Pi 3B+, which has a Broadcom 43455/6 according to Linux. All camcontrol finds is the mini SD card. I see only one call to sdhci_init_slot in bcm2835_sdhost.c so maybe that's the problem. It supports exactly one SDIO device, a memory card.
Any thoughts? Is it worth thinking about the wireless chip or is it just too much work?
# camcontrol devlist
<SDHC SC16G 8.0 SN 54B43C20 MFG 08/2018 > at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,sdda0)
# camcontrol devlist -v
<SDHC SC16G 8.0 SN 54B43C20 MFG 08/2018 > at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,sdda0)
<> at scbus-1 target -1 lun ffffffff (xpt0)

As you got no answer from somebody who knows more about this than I do I will try to give some pointers.

Here you can search through the history of the mailinglist. https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arm/date.html
Look for WiFi/SDIO/RPI kind of subjects.

The latest I found about this subject: https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arm/2020-October/022626.html.

I don't know anything about the current state. But a USB-WiFi dongle might be a reasonable shortcut.

I'll cc the Bjoern from this e-mail. @bjoern: do you have a status update?

Regards,
Ronald.

[Ronald Klop]

Post by Ronald Klop

According to a page that hasn't been updated for a while (https://wiki.freebsd.org/SDIO) work is in progress on Broadcom wireless drivers for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4.  I'm supposed to start by building the GENERIC-MMCCAM kernel.  A CAM device will then appear which I can then use camcontrol to talk to.  I built the kernel and booted it on my Pi 3B+, which has a  Broadcom 43455/6 according to Linux.   All camcontrol finds is the mini SD card. I see only one call to sdhci_init_slot in bcm2835_sdhost.c so maybe that's the problem.  It supports exactly one SDIO device, a memory card.
Any thoughts?  Is it worth thinking about the wireless chip or is it just too much work?
# camcontrol devlist
<SDHC SC16G 8.0 SN 54B43C20 MFG 08/2018 >  at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,sdda0)
# camcontrol devlist -v
<SDHC SC16G 8.0 SN 54B43C20 MFG 08/2018 >  at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,sdda0)
<>                                 at scbus-1 target -1 lun ffffffff (xpt0)

As you got no answer from somebody who knows more about this than I do I will try to give some pointers.
Here you can search through the history of the mailinglist. https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arm/date.html
Look for WiFi/SDIO/RPI kind of subjects.
The latest I found about this subject: https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arm/2020-October/022626.html.
I don't know anything about the current state. But a USB-WiFi dongle might be a reasonable shortcut.
Regards,
Ronald.

Oh, here is another update:
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arm/2020-February/021340.html which points to https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-wireless/2020-February/008985.html

So, somebody on the freebsd-wireless might know about it also,

IMHO It would be nice if the work-in-progress of this driver was shared in a known place so more people could help.

Regards,
Ronald.