---------------------------------------- Corsica and Bluetooth oktober 03rd, 2019 ---------------------------------------- This week my family and I went to Corsica to spend some days in the sun before winter arrives in Norway. This was my first time visiting Corsica, but probably not the last. Despite relaxing at the pool is not my favourite vacation activity, I took the opportunity to catch up on the BSD Now podcast. Some weeks ago, I also attended a class in identifcation of ants (of all things), so some of my time was spend crawling around on the ground, looking for ants under stones and around vegetation, and I ended up with at least 15 species. I'll know more in a couple of days, when I have access to my microscope and litterature again. I also have another project waiting for me at home: my ThinkPad X250 with FreeBSD on it. The machine has an Intel Dual Band 7265 Wifi and Bluetooth card. The Wifi part works fine on FreeBSD, but the bluetooth part is not supported. Recently there has been some work on the Intel 8260 bluetooth support. The problem seems that at bootup time, the card is in an uninitialized state and requires a firmware to be uploaded. In this phase only a subset of commands are available. Once the proprietory fireware is in place, all of the bluetooth commands should work. The method of uploading the firmware seems to differ a bit between the 7265 and 8260 cards. So instead of reading the book I had brought along on vacation, I thought that writing a firmware uploader for the 7265 cannot be that hard, and I spend a lot of time reading the sources of the FreeBSD bluetooth stack and Linux sources (Linux supports bluetooth on this card). It turns out that my work machine (a 3rd generation ThinkPad Carbon X1) has the same bluetooth card. Reading the kernel sources led me to the book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System". Interesting stuff. So maybe I'll be able to hack some bluetooth support for the Intel 7265. Time will show. Besides all that, we had a great time in Corsica. We did some hiking, and explored the island with a rental car and the children spent a whole lot of time at the beach and the pool. I feel ready to tacle the Norwegian winter now :) (DIR) Back ______________________________________________________________________________ Gophered by Gophernicus/3.0.1 on FreeBSD/amd64 12.3