# Updated RAL driver with RT3090 support in 9.1-RELEASE?



## MasterOne (Dec 23, 2012)

I am still not giving up with my intention of running FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE on my Acer Aspire One 753 netbook, although I am hitting the second dead end right now. First I had to discover, that video would not return on resume (still no clue how this can be fixed), then I had to discovered, that the Broadcom BCM43225 wireless chipset is not supported.

I just took a quick look for other wireless options on mini PCIe, but the only one that I could get at a good price on short notice would be the Delock Mini PCI Express WLAN + Bluetooth with Ralink RT3090 chipset, but there is little info on the RT3090 on FreeBSD. On OpenBSD it's supported since version 4.9 by the ral driver, but the ral FreeBSD man-page only goes till RT2600, so I guess this is a rather old version of that driver.

There was some talk about porting over the latest driver from OpenBSD, but no updated info, with some traces from March 2011 in the freebsd-current mailing list, about support for RT3090 being implemented in the RT2860 driver.

So any news on RT3090 on FreeBSD? Maybe already a working solution or up-to-date driver ported from OpenBSD available in FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE?


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## cpm@ (Dec 23, 2012)

Please, read freebsd-wireless mailing list, all those related improvements are discussed there.

[CFT] Ralink RT2860, RT2870, RT3060, RT3090 support: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-wireless/2012-May/001749.html.

Know that you can help testing the patch(1) and submit your information to developers [1]. 

[1] How to Contribute to FreeBSD.


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## MasterOne (Dec 23, 2012)

I wish it was that easy, but I don't have a Ralink unit (was considering to purchase one, but only if it was confirmed to be working). Also that discussion on the mailing list ended on 8th May 2012 with





			
				Bernhard Schmidt said:
			
		

> If nothing new comes up within the next few days I intend to commit this by the end of the week or something.


So has it been commited, and is the updated RT2860 driver with RT3090 support in 9.1-RELEASE?

I am sorry if the answer should be obvious, but I seem to be unable to check for myself.


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## cpm@ (Dec 23, 2012)

For now, it seems development current state *was* looking for testers to verify if works:http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-wireless/2011-October/000873.html.

Instead, you can try BCM43225 using ndis(4), read this thread.


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## MasterOne (Dec 23, 2012)

You are quoting a message that's even older (from 29th October 2011). I can't believe there is no updated info available any more after 8th May 2012.


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## cpm@ (Dec 23, 2012)

Just I didn't find new messages about RT3090 testers results. Sure is better take advantage of wireless card BCM43225 that your laptop have. 

Some interesting documentation about NDIS:
[1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config-network-setup.html.
[2] https://www.dan.me.uk/blog/2010/01/25/ndis-wifi-drivers-in-freebsd-project-evil/. 
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Driver_Interface_Specification.
[4] http://www.ndis.com/.


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## m6tt (Dec 25, 2012)

It looks like Berhard's ral got MFC'd. Support for 3090 should be quite good.


```
Revision 1.1.4.2: download - view: text, markup, annotated - select for diffs
Fri May 25 16:39:56 2012 UTC (7 months ago) by bschmidt
Branches: RELENG_8
Diff to: previous 1.1.4.1: preferred, colored
Changes since revision 1.1.4.1: +4103 -0 lines
SVN rev 236007 on 2012-05-25 16:39:56Z by bschmidt

MFC r232946,232958,235233:

r232946:
Update the rt2860's firmware and add a Makefile for the module. While
here remove the ucode header file which was used to generate the fw files
but by now is outdated.

r232958:
Import the latest microcode.h which was used to generate the current
firmware files and adjust the Makefile.

r235233:
Add support for Ralink RT2800/RT3000 chipsets.
```


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## cpm@ (Dec 25, 2012)

m6tt said:
			
		

> It looks like Berhard's ral got MFC'd. Support for 3090 should be quite good.
> 
> 
> ```
> ...



(1) http://freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/r236007.


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## MasterOne (Dec 27, 2012)

Cool, didn't even know about freshbsd.org! Now there is only one major show stopper left for installing FreeBSD on that Acer Aspire One 753 netbook, which is getting video back after resume. If I only had more time, but nobody gave a hint yet.


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## m6tt (Dec 28, 2012)

If it's anything like some other intel based laptops, maybe it will work only when Xorg is running. You will need KMS, and I'm not sure what that takes at this point on 9.1, since the last time I tried KMS it wasn't in the tree yet.

It may be as simple as 

```
echo 'WITH_NEW_XORG=true' >> /etc/make.conf
echo 'WITH_KMS=true' >> /etc/make.conf
cd /usr/ports/x11/xorg
make install clean
```

I'm not sure at all how to do KMS with packages...no experience with that.


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## MasterOne (Dec 30, 2012)

Tried it with KMS, still not working, have a look here.


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