2025-09-27 –, Gray Hall
The "wifi" (net80211) stack in NetBSD is aging (to put it polietly).
We have been working to adapt the FreeBSD stack (and keep that in sync) for multiple years now.
This is one of the longest running merge / update projects we ever had and it was also used to test some of our new repository infrastructure.
This talk will try to show the obstacles we ran into, the original problems we envisioned before starting and how many of them are still open. It will explain decisions where we opted to deviate from FreeBSD (e.g. in locking rules) and how we try to make the result future-proof and long-lasting by being able to feed back some of the changes and localize (i.e. hide from code shared with FreeBSD) others.
Parts of the FreeBSD stack are a "fast" moving target in order to deal with fast moving Linux upstream drivers. We are trying to track this as well, but it creates additional challenges as we are trying to avoid duplicating code that already exists in NetBSD to deal with DRM/KMS drivers also using a kind of "Linux compat shim".
Finaly the present state and a (hopefully) realistic plan how (and when) this branch finally will be merged into NetBSD-current will be presented.
- received a master degree (Diplominformatiker) from University of Paderborn
- been working as C++ developer for most parts of my professional carreer
- worked on a 3D architectural CAD software (written in C++) in my previous job
- currently working for a company doing product visualizations on the internet with various tools, including C++ backend stuff and BabylonJS/WebGL JavaScript/Typescript frontend stuff in the browser
- been a NetBSD developer since 2000, originally working on the ISDN stack
- sparc64 portmaster, release engineer and member of the core team
- always loved strange architectures and bizare machines, have a real VAX in my lab - doing "portability" as a hobby
- have been working on renewal of the net80211 stack since a few years