Creating a intel 4965agn device driver

MrCoolsman · Post by **MrCoolsman** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 10:22 pm

Hello,

I want to create an Intel wireless driver, but I cannot find the driver docs to do it. Intel usually does a good job at releasing them, but I've searched developer.intel.com and google and can't find them. Any help would be appreciated.

Oh, and I'm a new user. Great website!
MrCoolsman

pcmattman · Post by **pcmattman** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 10:56 pm

Hi,

Welcome to the forum. I've been in the same situation, and unless someone else has actually found the documentation for Intel's wireless NICs, you're probably stuck looking at source implementations. Linux or the BSD's are probably your best bet.

Hope this helps - and if anyone else knows where a proper spec is, by all means tell me I'm wrong

EDIT: The firmware binaries may also end up being problematic.

Troy Martin · Post by **Troy Martin** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 11:27 pm

An intense google returned nothing more than a "User Guide" which tells you how to put it in the slot and use it. Not very helpful.

VolTeK · Post by **VolTeK** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 11:31 pm

troy: pretty much,at intel, they dont assume any one does more than how to use it
pcmattman: yeah that is prety much your best bet

Brynet-Inc · Post by **Brynet-Inc** » Sat Jun 13, 2009 12:39 pm

OpenBSD's iwn(4) driver supports the 4965AGN series of Intel Wireless devices, pcmattman is correct though.. you may not be able to redistribute the firmware* in the US.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/s ... i/if_iwn.c
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/s ... f_iwnreg.h
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/s ... f_iwnvar.h

Presumably you could host the firmware elsewhere in the world, or provide instructions for extracting the firmware from a Windows driver.

* Firmware is code executed by the internal processor within the Wireless device, not your kernel.

pcmattman · Post by **pcmattman** » Sat Jun 13, 2009 5:52 pm

Firmware is code executed by the internal processor within the Wireless device, not your kernel.

My point was that the firmware has to be installed, which may require a little more support in the kernel.

NickJohnson · Post by **NickJohnson** » Sat Jun 13, 2009 7:50 pm

I think the firmware/microcode for the 4965agn is publicly available. I have that card in my laptop, and Gentoo is able to install it as a package with no (apparent) strings attached. Also, the Linux driver ("iwlwifi") works quite well for me, and is part of the main kernel source tree - you may want to check that out as well. I believe Intel actually wrote it and released the source code, so it's bound to be a good source of documentation

.

Edit: Some more interesting information from the iwlwifi website. Although the Linux driver itself is open source, the microcode is under a license which means it cannot be reverse engineered, otherwise someone could make the card violate its FCC certification. So unless you know the internals of the card (which no one does), you're stuck with using that binary blob in conjunction with your driver; if you somehow could rewrite it, I'm sure you could get a lot more "interesting" functionality out of the hardware.

MrCoolsman · Post by **MrCoolsman** » Sat Jun 13, 2009 7:59 pm

According to http://intellinuxwireless.org/?n=FAQ&s=license, the binaries/firmware are freely distributable.

Thanks for the link, Brynet-Inc. I'll have to take a closer look at the source before I'll understand it.

OSDev.org

Creating a intel 4965agn device driver

Creating a intel 4965agn device driver

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