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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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