*BSD driver for Ralink RT2500/RT2600 chipsets

About

This project aims at supporting Ralink wireless network adapters under *BSD. Visit this page for a list of supported devices. The ral driver is distributed under the terms of the BSD License. It is a work in progress. See the following section for more information about the project latest developments.
You may have noticed that the Linux driver developped by Ralink Technology is under GPL and that the ral driver is not. The ral driver is NOT a port of the Linux driver but is a complete rewrite. Absolutely no code has been taken from Ralink Technology which does not support neither officially nor unofficially this driver in any way.

What's new?

October 22, 2006
Many readers have asked me what does the big "Discontinued" all across this web site mean. I think you all deserve more explanations.
Firstly, I'd like to reassure everyone: it doesn't mean that I stopped working on this project. It has appeared clearly to me that I won't have enough time to maintain these web pages anymore and that they've become largely outdated, leading to some confusion for users who were referring to them instead of the up-to-date manual pages. So this web site has slowly become more a problem than a real help which was its original intent.
Secondly, as some of you may be aware of, I've decided to focus mainly on the OpenBSD version of my drivers. I believe the source code is clean enough that they can be ported to other BSD operating systems with minor efforts. Thus, the time that I spend working on OpenBSD can benefit other BSDs too.
PayPal or hardware donations are always welcome of course, as they help me to add support for more devices and to do more interoperability testing.
You can track changes to the drivers using the OpenBSD CVS mailing list.
For the record, here is the list of OpenBSD drivers I'm involved into (in no particular order):
ipw(4), iwi(4), wpi(4), ral(4), ural(4), rum(4), uath(4), zyd(4), nfe(4), and ueagle(4).

Some links you may find interesting:
KernelTrap.org "Interview: Jonathan Gray and Damien Bergamini"
KernelTrap.org "OpenBSD: wpi, A Blob Free Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Driver"
KernelTrap.org "OpenBSD: Intel Accused Of Being "An Open Source Fraud""

Articles in French:
DLFP "Journal : Driver wifi pour OpenBSD"
DLFP "BSD : Intel seulement open pour le business"

January 9, 2006
I've committed support for three new wireless chipsets in OpenBSD-current. These are the RT2561, RT2561S and RT2661 (MIMO) chipsets from Ralink. See the commit log for more details. Great thanks to Ralink Tech. for allowing us to redistribute the microcode files under the ISC license. Great thanks to www.minipci.biz for donating hardware.

January 7, 2006
Thanks to some donations, I've been able to write a driver for the Ralink RT2661 chipset. This driver will soon be committed in OpenBSD and FreeBSD. The RT2661 chipset has some interesting pre-802.11n features such as MIMO and frame aggregation. Not all these features will be supported in the first version though.

December 20, 2005
I'd like to thank www.minipci.biz who generously donated a AirLink AWLC5025 MIMO XR™ adapter based on the (not yet supported) RT2600 chipset.

November 18, 2005
I've added some simple rate control algorithm to ural(4). The algorithm is called AMRR (Adaptive Multi Rate Retry) and uses the multi-rate retry capabilities of the RT2570 chipset. The code has been committed to FreeBSD 7-CURRENT and OpenBSD-current.

July 1, 2005
The ral(4) and ural(4) drivers have been imported in NetBSD. Great thanks to everyone who make this possible! NetBSD has recently switched to the latest 802.11 stack from FreeBSD. This means that 802.11i (aka WPA) will be supported soon.

June 29, 2005
I've fixed a write mbuf-after free bug in the FreeBSD and OpenBSD versions of the ral(4) driver. It appears that this patch also fixes a couple of problems with WEP and HostAP mode. The duration field of outgoing 802.11 frames was not setup properly when the mbuf chain needed to be defragmented.

May 24, 2005
The ral(4) and ural(4) drivers are now in the FreeBSD GENERIC kernel. You no longer need to load the module by hand for your device to be recognized.

May 22, 2005
I've committed changes to ral and ural in FreeBSD 6-CURRENT. These changes should fix WPA (802.11i) support. Please test and give feedback!

May 21, 2005
Jérémy Bobbio has ported the ural driver to Linux. It uses part of the madwifi driver. This driver has a dedicated web page.

May 19, 2005
A new article "OpenBSD 3.7: The Wizard of OS" by Frederico Biancuzzi has been published on OnLamp.com. It relates the different advances made in OpenBSD, including the support for many new wireless devices (like ral and ural) in 3.7.

May 04, 2005
Great thanks to iMil for backporting the ral driver to NetBSD 2.0.x. iMil has also developed a LKM version of the ral driver for NetBSD 2.0. A patch against ral-netbsd-1.0.tgz is also available for NetBSD-current. See the original post on tech-kern and tech-net.

April 19, 2005
I'm pleased to announce that I've just committed the ral and ural drivers in FreeBSD-CURRENT. See the commit log here. This means that the development of the ral and ural drivers will now continue in the tree. I will no longer distribute separate tarballs (except for NetBSD).

April 02, 2005
I've just released ral version 1.2 for FreeBSD 6-CURRENT. This new version fixes a lot of bugs (like device timeouts) in ral and HostAP bugs in ral and ural. The fixes have also been committed to OpenBSD-CURRENT. A new NetBSD version will follow soon. Please report remaining bugs on the forum.

March 23, 2005
I've just released ral version 1.1 for FreeBSD. This new version contains the new ural driver for RT2500USB based wireless adapters. It also fixes several issues that were present in 1.0.1 and adds support for WPA-PSK using wpa_supplicant (tested with both ral and ural). IBSS and HostAP modes are now sort of functionnal (not tested extensively though).

March 22, 2004
The ural driver has been ported from OpenBSD to NetBSD-current by Naoki Fukaumi. Please visit his web page to download it. Great thanks to Naoki Fukaumi for his work.

March 18, 2005
I've decided to replace the ral mailing-list by a forum. The ral@ml.free.fr mailing-list is now closed. Unfortunately, I never had the time to maintain a working mailing-list archive.

March 17, 2005
I've just committed the ural driver into OpenBSD source tree. It supports USB 2.0 wireless adapters based on the Ralink RT2500USB chipset. I've updated the list of supported devices accordingly. Versions for FreeBSD 6-CURRENT and NetBSD-CURRENT will follow soon.

March 12, 2005
I've just released ral version 1.0 for FreeBSD-CURRENT and NetBSD-CURRENT. You can download it right now. Follow the documentation and read the ral man page to install and configure the driver. I apologize for the delay but I've been very busy lately with other stuff. Please report any problems directly to the forum. I'm waiting for your feedback!

March 08, 2005
An interesting article about the state of wireless support in OpenBSD has been published on KernelTrap.org. It talks about the status of the ipw and iwi drivers in OpenBSD (and the firmware license issues) as well as the ral driver. Great thanks to Jeremy Andrews for writing this article.

February 16, 2005
I've just committed the ral driver into OpenBSD-CURRENT CVS tree. It is at a very early development stage though so it is very likely that it won't work for you. I'll prepare tarballs for FreeBSD 6-CURRENT and NetBSD-CURRENT once the OpenBSD version will be stable enough. Thanks for your patience.

February 02, 2005
I've made significant progress with the ral driver. I'm now able to associate and to have connectivity in infrastructure mode under OpenBSD and FreeBSD (-CURRENT). The rate adaptation algorithm is not fully implemented yet. I plan to release a very alpha version soon.

January 21, 2005
Creation of this web site. Important announcements will be posted to the ral mailing list too. An archive of this mailing list is available here (obsoleted). It is updated daily.

December 10, 2005
I've been very busy with other projects (mainly with ipw and iwi drivers) and with real-life things. As a consequence, the development of the ral driver has been delayed a bit further.

November 15, 2005
I started working on the ral driver. The first step consisted in reverse enginering the Ralink RT2500 chipset specification using the GPL'ed Linux driver. I also bought a MSI-CB54G2 adapter. It is a cheap cardbus wireless adapter based on the RT2500 chipset. Development is done under OpenBSD during my spare time.

Credits

The ral driver and this web site are developped and maintained by Damien Bergamini.
Ralink Technology, Corp. does not support, neither officially, nor unofficially this driver in any way.