Re: 7.0_BETA feedback sought

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

> Got a newer laptop gifted to me this week and had the great
> pleasure of booting the latest install image from releng
> (20150106). Attached is the dmesg. I would have continued with
> the install except for the lack of wireless and other
> networking hardware support.

Wireless is probably this one:

> pci3: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, wr/inv ok
> vendor 0x14e4 product 0x4353 (miscellaneous network, revision 0x01) at pci3 dev 0 function 0 not configured

which according to our pcidevs is "BCM43224 Dualband 802.11", and
which appears to handle all of the a/b/g/n protocols.

It does appear to be of the same family as the chips supported by
our "bwi" driver.  I've looked, and it appears that neither FreeBSD
nor OpenBSD currently have support for this variant in their "bwi"
drivers.

Unsurprisingly, there appears to be support for it in the Linux
camp, via among others the "wl" driver, ref.

  https://wiki.debian.org/wl

and that driver supports some of the same chips our "bwi" driver
does.  I've not managed to find the source of this driver
(admittedly I've not looked too hard), to see how the BCM43224 is
handled differently from the other variants supported by that
driver, but without looking it's my guess is that it should not be
too difficult (famous last words...) to get it working at least for
the b/g protocols.

Regards,

- Håvard