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Corsica and Bluetooth
oktober 03rd, 2019
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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 :)
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