BSD drivers. . . possible to implement in X?

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I just bought a linksys gigabit card on a whim, and before I take it back I'm wondering if it can be made to work on the mac. There are BSD drivers for it. Does anybody know if it's possible to get the bsd drivers working, and thus to get Mac OS X to recognize the card?



Thanks.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    Well, yes. Ideally, you'd just compile it. Otherwise, it may require some small measure of porting.



    Anyone care to correct me? Is it a kernel thing?
  • Reply 2 of 6
    Quote:

    Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R

    Well, yes. Ideally, you'd just compile it. Otherwise, it may require some small measure of porting.



    Anyone care to correct me? Is it a kernel thing?




    the porting part isn't worth the 6 bucks I lose to restock policy, though.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    Update: I found a driver from syskonnect.de that is supposed to work, but it actually doesn't. Now I wonder if the board is actually broken. Oh well, I can take it back anyway.



  • Reply 4 of 6
    Quote:

    Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R

    Well, yes. Ideally, you'd just compile it. Otherwise, it may require some small measure of porting.



    Anyone care to correct me? Is it a kernel thing?




    drivers do tend to be nearly kernel level type stuff. i don't think it'll be an easy port.



    but, in a strangely reverse scenario, one of the bsds (i think netbsd) recently got the ability to use darwin/macosx drivers. i can't remember which bsd, but one of its selling points is binary compatibility with a lot of different systems.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    Quote:

    Originally posted by thuh Freak

    drivers do tend to be nearly kernel level type stuff. i don't think it'll be an easy port.



    but, in a strangely reverse scenario, one of the bsds (i think netbsd) recently got the ability to use darwin/macosx drivers. i can't remember which bsd, but one of its selling points is binary compatibility with a lot of different systems.




    Anyway, as I said, there is a macOSX driver. Apparently the "sk98lin" driver supports the card in linux, yet the "sk98osx" driver doesn't support the card in OS X. Pretty weird.



    Linksys's own damn fault for using an obscure, poorly supported chipset. I doubt that Linux actually recognizes the card either.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    Drivers in BSD are (almost) nothing like drivers in MacOS X, and must be re-written to work. Much of the research and thinking needed to create the drivers for BSD is useable, but the interface to the OS is not. There have been some projects to wrap individual BSD drivers for use with IOKit (one of the types of drivers.. the one that would be used for an ethernet card for instance), but there is no general project.



    That being said, there is a project currently underway to allow MacOS X-style drivers to work in FreeBSD, one that has seen some success recently. The thinking is that MacOS X has a larger user-base for client computers, and thus will get quite a number of drivers that would not be produced for the BSD's (if you can't beat 'em... join 'em... or at least steal freely...). Plus IOKit is a well designed driver interface. Hopefully FreeBSD driver writers will start writing for IOKit, and MacOS X will inherit their work.
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