dhcpcd development has sadly stalled

[rsmarples]

I'm really struggling to do any development work right now my main dev box which hosts the VM's I use to ensure dhcpcd works on a lot of OS's didn't survive my recent house move too well. One of the things that broke was the antenna connection on the wireless network card.

It's my Birthday tomorrow and I'm hoping some kind soul gets me this Wifi 7 PCie card or failing that a USB dongle that might work which keeps dropping off my network.

Replacement card ordered, thanks for the birthday present @gnaaman-dn

UPDATE: The shiny new Wifi 7 card arrived! Many thanks, it works really well on Windows. Sadly not any of the BSD's or even Linux. But this is fine as it allows my gaming PC to use it and finally allows transfers to my steamdeck of over 1Gbps which is important for my kids when they swap games. This now free's up the Wifi 6 card it was using for use in my dev box - an Intel 7260 which is very well supported by all the OS's of interest to dhcpcd :)

For those interested, this has created a dilemma - the NetBSD network stack only supports a/b/g protocols which means a maximum of 54Mbps (27Mbps in the real world as Wifi is half duplex). Now this is fine as it's enough to support a modern Fedora desktop over VNC via Qemu to my Windows gaming PC where I do the actual work. The same driver is pretty much the same story on all the BSD's sadly. But this isn't the dilemma :)

On NetBSD I use ZFS so everything is nice and reliable. I even wrote a guide on how to use ZFS on your root partition to make partitioning nice and easy. But sadly this has a consequence - the iwm driver can't load the firmware because it's not on the ramdisk and unlike other drivers it only loads the firmware at autoconf and not when the interface is brought up. The easy fix is to manually put it in the ramdisk but this means maintaining custom ramdisk which is a little sucky. I do have a patch to load the firmware at interface up, which works, but causes a kernel panic later down the stack for reasons unknown. But I finally have a stable boot sequence and finally a reliable wifi driver that delivers enough performance on to develop remotely as I no longer have space for a second head and keyboard.

I mean yes, I could convert the whole dev stack to Linux and get better wifi but the NetBSD wifi is good enough for my needs right now.

I big thankyou once again to @gnaaman-dn who made this possible and I shall resume dhcpcd work once more as time permits.
My immediate focus is to make a new stable release.

[perkelix]

I just shared this with my network. Hopefully, a UK-based friend can chip in.

[gnaaman-dn]

Sent you enough money for the PCIe card over paypal.

Happy birthday, hope it'll be a pleasant one.

[rsmarples]

Wow many thanks! Card ordered :)