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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