[Solved] Ralink rt2870 wifi support?

tim-m89 · #1 September 14th, 2009, 01:25

Original question:

Does FreeBSD support RaLink rt2870. My exact wifi is this if that makes any difference?

Update:

Summary of this thread:
egorenar has been developing an rt2860 and a rt2870 driver for both FreeBSD 7.2 and 8.0.
He is hosting them here.
Download the latest tarball that is correct for both your chipset and your FreeBSD version. Then:

Code:

tar xvzf driver.tar.gz
cd driver
make

As root or prepending with sudo the usual commands for driver loading kldstat, kldload, kldunload can be used or, if you prefer, you may want them to load automatically at boot time:

Code:

cp rt2870.ko /boot/modules/
chmod 555 /boot/modules/rt2870.ko

And add a line to /boot/loader.conf:

Code:

rt2870_load="YES"

Loading rt2860.ko/rt2870.ko will create the hardware interface rt28600/rt28700 respectively but since version 8 of FreeBSD, these are not controlled directly for the usual settings but with a virtual interface that must created either manually like:

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev rt28700

Or automatically via /etc/rc.conf. Snippet of my rc.conf for a wpa network (must have a wpa_supplicant.conf file in /etc/):

Code:

wlans_rt28700="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA inet 192.168.2.110 netmask 255.255.255.0 country NZ"
defaultrouter="192.168.2.1"

During the development a slight bug in FreeBSD wifi was found. If your Access point sends ADDBA requests you may need this to get 802.11n working. You will need kernel source to patch it. Follow the usual guide for rebuilding the kernel.

If you use FreeBSD 7.2 with 802.11N then you may also want this patch. This patch is not required for FreeBSD 8.0 though unlike the above patch.

I have been successfully using this rt2870 driver for a 802.11n connection with WPA2-AES security for a while now and others have reported great success with both rt2860 and rt2870 in 802.11N mode.

If you can correctly use FreeBSD's wifi then any feedback specific to this driver is a great help for it's ongoing development. Posts to this thread may become very helpful to other users (if they are experiencing the same problems for example).

A big thank you to egorenar for all his efforts.

.

Update:

If anyone is interested in why he dropped development of this. He has been very busy. It turn's out that he is also the legendary graf_chokolo. He has made some important developments in getting ps3's to run homebrew. Homebrew doesn't necessarily mean piracy but sony have their lawyers all over his ass anyway. He has been struggling with legal bills and could really do with some help.

Meanwhile development for the run driver will likely be supported long term. It is from another developer but supports as similar set of hardware and is include within the latest freebsd source tree.

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