Monthly Archives: April 2018

D-Link DIR AP and IPv6

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If you have one of those very common D-Link DIR WiFi router/AP (such as the DIR-605L rev B2), you should know that they don’t get very well with IPv6. At least the vendor firmware doesn’t. Probably most people around here don’t even know and probably don’t even care. But that’s really no good 🙁

Apparently not all IPv6 messages seem to get through. ICMP6 echo-request on link-local addresses are not a problem. However RS messages between Ethernet ports don’t always get through. Here is a little diagram of what goes through and what doesn’t:

This was tested with FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p9 and Debian 9.4.0 and on two different hosts (my trusty ol’ ThinkPad X201 and a homemade station with a Ralink Ethernet card). Still a lot of packets to test though. Don’t know if IPv6 packets themselves go through or not. However RS/RA don’t and that’s sufficient to make IPv6 completely unusable.

I will update the figure above when I know more. Although that may be never, don’t know yet. One solution would be to upgrade the firmware to either DD-WRT or Tomato router. However those are not supporter on the DIR 605L rev B2. Also this was supposed to be a replacement and we already bought a much better alternative.

FreeBSD on Intel Broadwell

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Around two years ago I posted about using FreeBSD 10 on the X250. A great deal has happened since then.

It is now possible to use the Intel Broadwell integrated graphic card (among others) under FreeBSD-CURRENT FreeBSD-STABLE! Also if I’m right, this will be integrated in FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE. What a great day it is for FreeBSD on the desktop. I bet FreeBSD 12 will be truly great!

Note that it works much better on STABLE now than CURRENT because CURRENT is -well- not that stable…

So if you want to try this now, what you first need to do is to upgrade to the STABLE branch. For this you need to fetch the source, buildworld, buildkernel and installworld. Here is a very quick tuto (that you may need to adapt though). You can also find this here.


# Don't forget to upgrade RELEASE
# in any case that there were any bugs in the building tools.
freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
reboot
freebsd-update install

# Replace the current source tree with STABLE.
mv /usr/src /usr/src-RELEASE
svn checkout svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable/11 /usr/src

# Build! Build! Build!
cd /usr/src
make buildworld -j4

# Customize (while you are at it) and build STABLE kernel.
cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf
cp GENERIC {YOUR-CONF}
vim {YOUR-CONF}
cd /usr/src
make buildkernel KERNCONF={YOUR-CONF}
make installkernel KERNCONF={YOUR-CONF}
reboot

# Now it's time to install world over the new kernel.
# In the meantime we also update configuration files
# with mergemaster.
mergemaster -p
cd /usr/src
make installworld
mergemaster -Ui
reboot

Now that your are on the latest STABLE, you can update the ports tree and install drm-next.


# Install ports tree if needed.
portsnap fetch
portsnap extract

# Install drm-next.
cd /usr/ports/graphics/drm-next-kmod
make install clean

Finally you must tell rc.conf to use the new i915 module instead. That is, add in /etc/rc.conf:


kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"

Just one final reboot and you are done! Test this with the xorg and mesa-demos ports. Just startx from your user and check /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see if the intel driver was correctly loaded.