RTL8181 NetBSD Port

11/11/04 - As you can see, not much has happened. Unless I get some active interest I won't work on this any further. If you want to kernel hack the RTL8181 go to the very active Alternative Linux RTL8181 port on Sourceforge. They have made very good progress.

I have started porting the RTL8181 to NetBSD. It's early days yet. So far all I have done is hack up existing embedded MIPS kernel stuff to munge it into a form that hopefully will work on the RTL8181.

Extract the tarball below into your NetBSD source tree at src/sys/arch/evbmips.

rtl-070804.tar.gz
It builds cleanly but is still a dog's breakfast.
TODO: Remove YAMON references, get internal peripherals initialised, serial port driver, inet stack, eth driver, wireless MAC driver.

Resources

Mailing list: Port-RTL8181

Building and Testing It

You won't need NetBSD to build and test a usable system. I have been using Fedora Core 2 successfully. The beauty of NetBSD is the source tree is entirely self contained. You don't need to scour the universe to find obscure tarballs to get it working. I understand that using Cygwin the same can be done in Windows with nary a *NIX/BSD partition in sight. I don't see why this couldn't be built on an OS-X system either.

Hopefully before Christmas 2004 we'll all be running super snazzy NetBSD in our Minitar APs!

From NetBSD use anoncvs or one of the tarball archives to get the latest -current NetBSD source tree. You won't need stuff like games/ or X11 so don't bother getting them.

As it says above, extract the RTL8181 patches into the tree.

Build the tools from src/. Here is my build command. Fix up your pathnames:
./build.sh -U -m evbmips-eb -T /home/blah/netbsd/tools -D /home/blah/netbsd/dest -O /home/blah/netbsd/objs -R /home/blah/netbsd/release tools

Build an RTL8181 kernel. Replace tools and the end of the last line with kernel=RTL8181.

Um, it'll probably break here but if you get this far it's time to start hacking it up!