msk(4) Driver

[indienick]

Although I am relatively new to BSDs, in general, and have been sinking my teeth into OpenBSD, I want to try out FreeBSD; I just want to get acquainted with the ways different BSDs handle.

The one question I have, with FreeBSD, is with concerns to the msk driver for Yukon-branded network cards: my laptop, which I will be trying FreeBSD out on, has a Yukon 2-FE (88E8040..?) LAN card, which is supported by OpenBSD's msk driver, but FreeBSD's does not support it. I have installed FreeBSD 7.1, but the card just simply isn't supported.

In that OpenBSD's msk driver supports it, and FreeBSD's doesn't, are there any steps I could take to using OpenBSD's msk driver in FreeBSD, or at least getting my network card working in FreeBSD?

[BSDfan666]

You cannot use OpenBSD drivers in FreeBSD, this would require a considerable amount of porting.. they aren't the same operating system.

Support for Yukon-2 FE+ devices was added near the end of 4.5 development, if FreeBSD is going to support them.. it probably won't be until the next release.

EDIT: FreeBSD 7.2 was just released.. you might find yourself lucky.

[indienick]

Thank you for your response, BSDfan666! I had a strong suspicion that an OpenBSD driver would not pan out in FreeBSD, and your response solidified that suspicion.

There are a myriad of Google results, when searching for "freebsd yukon 2 fe", that all point to the same mailing list archive concerning the FreeBSD msk author's (Pyun YongHyeon) attempts at a patch for the driver, but those archives date back to July 2008, and if I have read correctly, it seems that there was no successful patch for the FreeBSD msk driver.

As for lucking out with the 7.2 release, I am downloading it just to see if it will work (gotta love high-speed connections at work), but it still seems as though I will be SOL.

What's the policy on taking code from the OpenBSD driver and porting it to FreeBSD?

[BSDfan666]

The BSD projects interchange code quite often, but OpenBSD's msk(4) and FreeBSD's msk(4) appear to share only the same name.. perhaps some ideas.. porting changes between them isn't as easy as it sounds.

[indienick]

Oookay. So, although I am digressing from the original topic on my own thread, what - generically - would make porting the driver such a hefty task? I have never done any sort of device/driver programming before; it's the only reason I ask.