Hello Colin,
On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 10:17:26PM -0500, Colin Parker wrote:
Hello, I am new to Genode/Sculpt and have been trying to get it working on my somewhat old Mac Mini. I eventually succeeded to make it boot, by disabling some unnecessary drivers like PS2.
wow, that's cool to hear.
However, wifi doesn't work, and I would like that feature. There is an internal wifi card in the computer that doesn't work on Linux, so I bought a USB dongle that I've been using (with Linux). From looking at some of the source, it seems most of the drivers are brought in from Linux, but, I'm not sure if or how wifi usb is supported. There's a usb_net.list but I can't figure out if it includes wifi. Is this something that would be easy to add? Is bringing drivers over a pretty simple process like copying a few files or is it an extensive effort? Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
The wifi driver available in Genode is a port of the Intel's wifi driver in Linux. So, it supports Intel wifi cards only. This is due to the fact that most developers at Genode Labs use some Thinkpad laptop, which typically use Intel peripherals.
The USB net driver supports a bunch of USB-Ethernet cards, but no wifi :-(.
Coming to your question: I'm afraid it is no easy task to just add some other wifi driver. Depending on the kind of device, porting a driver from the Linux kernel can become a quite extensive work. The effort for the first Intel wifi driver port for instance was 3 person-month or above, when I remember correctly. Of course, it would be probably easier to enable a USB-Wifi device, which uses an Intel chipset already supported. But I'm not aware of such a device. Porting a completely new wifi chipset - potentially connected via USB - might be easier today, because one can use the existent USB-device and Intel wifi port to look at, but it is definitely much more than just copying a few files.
Probably, my colleague Josef Söntgen will have a more professional assessment, because he ported the wifi driver, but I'm afraid there is no easy solution.
Best regards Stefan
Colin
Genode users mailing list users@lists.genode.org https://lists.genode.org/listinfo/users