Wireless Fidelity with bwfm(4)
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2019-10-27

The Broadcom Wireless FullMAC chip has been one of the biggest hurdles in properly supporting Apple MacBooks in the recent years. But that has not been the only place where this chip has popped up. bwfm(4) is a new OpenBSD driver that supports these chips and was also ported to NetBSD. This talks gives an overview of the chip, an in-depth view into how one communicates with the chip on the three different supported busses, and the higher layer protocol that’s being run on top. It also shows issues properly combining the driver with the OpenBSD net80211 stack, which isn’t written to handle FullMACs. The talk also shows the Firmware and NVRAM distribution issues.

Patrick Wildt has been maintaining and improving the OpenBSD armv7 and arm64 subtree for several years, adding support for multiple SoCs and adding device tree support. Recently he wrote bwfm(4) to add support for the Broadcom FullMAC chips.

Patrick Wildt

Patrick Wildt works for genua, a company that builds OpenBSD based firewalls and VPN gateways. He has been an OpenBSD developer since 2012, where he takes care of the ARM subtree, writes device drivers to support new hardware, and occasionally updates the compiler infrastructure.