ROD TCP/IP Stack 7.06 released with Wifi

RISC OS Developments is pleased to announce the release of v7.06 of its TCP/IP stack which includes a number of significant changes and improvements. Perhaps the most significant of these is the inclusion of our Wifi driver supporting a broad (pardon the pun) range of Broadcom SDIO-based wifi chips including those found on the various Raspberry Pi models, and Pinebook Pro.

The new version also includes packet filtering (allowing programs such as WireSalmon to be used) which also paves the way for the Firewall features.

The USB ethernet driver now also supports CDC type USB ethernet devices for gigabit ethernet, notably those with ASIX chips. but Realtek ones are also seen (but are experimental).

Alongside the main TCP/IP stack, you can also download a beta of the Network Manager software which provides a modern user interface for managing connections both wired and wifi. This allows easy connection to Wifi networks with no need to reboot, and also allows seemless switching between wired and wireless network. It supports profiles allowing you to configure networking for different situations – eg. at home, at work etc. with different network settings, interfaces (wired/wireless) or security settings. You can then switch profiles by simply selecting them from the menu, with the RISC OS networking automatically adjusting to suit.

All in all, this is a major update of the software, and we’d encourage users to download it for free from https://www.riscosdev.com/
Click on “Projects” at the top of the page to find the download links.

Installing the 7.06 stack went smoothly and seems to work properly. It removes the WiFi interface from the network configuration in RISC OS 5.30, but !NetManager provides its own WiFi user interface, as far as I see and understand things.

For ignorant users like me however, a !Help file for both !NetManager and !Import would be very useful. The former has a lot of options that I don’t really know what to do with it, while the latter just stiffs the computer. Unstiffing can only be done by switching it off.

Thanks for the feedback, Paul. You touch on why things are still marked “beta”, and documentation is a big part of that.

!Import is designed to import any previous TCP/IP settings into !NetManager – most people will never need to use it, but if you have a customised configuration in !InetSetup, then !Import should handle that. Generally speaking, you’d want to run it precisely once, and before running !NetManager for the first time.

Out of interets I ran the NetManager app on my ARNX6 and it sees my WiFi network, not very well and the computer when connected to it gets an IP address,

(boggle) I know that some Wandboards used Broadcom wifi chips, but the lack of firmware etc stopped us in our tracks (plus horror stories from Linux world). Are you saying that the existing firmware blobs allow it to (basically) function? I’m a bit surprised because I didn’t think we’d issued a suitably SDIO-enabled ROM for that system yet. If you’d like to drop me a line, I can send you a more recent ROM which may allow more progress.

The WiFi extender is only about 6 inches away from the front of the computer and the signal strength is about 35% at best. I get a different IP address for the computer from the WiFi than the Ethernet conection.

I have not yet tried unpluging the ethernet cable to test if the WiFi work at transfering data.

Will send an email in a few days time.

I get a different IP address for the computer from the WiFi than the Ethernet conection.

Expected, the wired and wireless interfaces will have different MAC addresses

Thinking:

The WiFi extender is only about 6 inches away from the front of the computer and the signal strength is about 35% at best.

No aerial for the Wi-Fi chip in the Wandboard??

An aerial makes a lot of difference to my CM4. With aerial 75% plus signal strength.

An aerial makes a lot of difference to my CM4.

Is that noise I hear the sound of Andrew creating a bit of a hardware upgrade for the Wandboard based machines?

One issus I found is that the computer at some point completly locks up and the only solutionis turning it off and on again.

An issue I keep seeing, but couldn’t pin down what was triggering it, was the hourglass appearing every second or so whilst I guess the WiFi is reconnecting or doing something. It made the computer unusable as Keyboard and Mouse clicks where ignored whilst the hourglass was showing and it only stopped when I quit NM.

I’m not sure if it’s NM or the WiFi app doing it, probably NM I guess as it performs the auto-connect?

Posted over WiFi on the ARMX6

The WiFi chip MAC address appears to be registered by:

Universal Global Scientific Industrial Co., Ltd.
141,Lane351,Taiping Rd.Sec.1, nan tou 542, TW
Taiwan

Accodring to MACadd

I finally took the time to install the ROD stack (7.06a) on my 4té2 and the Network Manager. So far the only annoyance is NetTime’s inability to update the clock when booting. I could switch without problems between cable and WiFi.

Today I made a little test with a 155MB file from MPlayer’s test samples website using !Netsurf: 2.0 MBytes/s while connected and 1.0 MBytes/s per second using WiFi (the router is only 50cm away). I should have though to do the same test before installing the ROD stack but I remember a similar attempt with the ROOL WiFi rapidly crawling down to 30 KBytes/s before I stopped the download.

Ah, and using the Chromium on the Unix on the same machine was much faster. Chromium was not providing any info but it was roughly 7 MBytes/s (probably a limit set by the Internet provider).