# Porting new drivers to older version of FreeBSD



## bsdusr (Aug 5, 2009)

Hi,

I have a question, I want to know how it is possible to port a driver (CM9) to an older release of freebsd (i.e. 4X), if it is not possible to install a newer version.

Thanks!


----------



## aragon (Aug 5, 2009)

If you don't know C, you'll need to hire a C programmer to do it.  Expect it to be expensive.


----------



## dennylin93 (Aug 5, 2009)

Trying a newer version of FreeBSD might be the best option.


----------



## SirDice (Aug 5, 2009)

IIRC the 4.x versions had no wireless support. So you'll need to completely port that too to make it work.


----------



## aragon (Aug 5, 2009)

dennylin93 said:
			
		

> Trying a newer version of FreeBSD might be the best option.


Agreed.  FreeBSD is not windows... newer versions don't bloat your old hardware.  FreeBSD 7 is actually faster than FreeBSD 4 in my limited experience.  I recently upgraded an 8 year old FreeBSD 4 system to 7 and wish I'd done so sooner!


----------



## bsdusr (Aug 6, 2009)

Maybe more details needed. In fact, there was an embedded OS derived from freebsd 4.x called "m0n0" and it didn't support CM9, but the newer version of it supports but needs 64MB RAM while the wireless set we have that is a wrap pc engine that has 32 MB of RAM. The version we installed supports this but misses the driver of CM9, the new version supports CM9 (got this driver from freebsd, they didn't write by themselves) (&IPv6 & etc.), but it needs 64 MB RAM. So, I thought that probably the way is to port that driver to the older version, or possibly find some other OS that fits in what we need. Because it is impossible to upgrade its RAM.


----------



## aragon (Aug 6, 2009)

pfSense
NanoBSD


----------

