Calling the BATMAN: Free Networks on FreeBSD By: Aymeric Wibo

BATMAN (Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) is a routing protocol for wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks, which is used and developed by projects such as Freifunk to build open city-scale Wi-Fi mesh networks.
It is implemented as a kernel module in the Linux kernel as batman-adv, which I partially ported to FreeBSD as part of a GSoC project.
This talk will present BATMAN, how it works, and the work done to port batman-adv (how well the port works, what's missing vs Linux, &c). It will focus on the process of using the LinuxKPI for porting drivers from Linux to FreeBSD and its implications for future driver development/maintenance on FreeBSD.
Full description:
This talk will cover:
What BATMAN is, how the BATMAN V algorithm works at a high level, and how/where it's used in real life in practice, i.e., why is it interesting for FreeBSD devices to be able to participate in such networks?
The various components that needed to be changed (aside from porting batman-adv itself, there were smaller changes to surrounding software such as ifconfig, netlink, &c).
A walkthrough of adding a Linux function to the LinuxKPI, and a bit more of a deepdive into the modifications brought to the batman-adv codebase to support FreeBSD to give an idea of how easy/hard it is to bring a driver such as this one in from Linux helped by LinuxKPI nowadays.
My experience with setting up a small BATMAN network in my dorm's neighbourhood.
I will also touch on my intentions to make a port out of this and add support for Wi-Fi in the future (or the current status of the port/Wi-Fi support if I find time to work on those before the BSDCan).

[@aylind2626]

Quel beau jeune homme

[@piwy_dev]

Woooow Aymeric tu es trop mignon !!!!

[@maalumi]

This project is based on a literal copy of the GPL licensed code.

[@obiwac]

It’s not a copy it *is* the GPL-licensed code. And that’s fine so long as it’s not distributed under a different license, which it’s not.