FreeBSD The Power to Serve

More wireless updates

Links:
Bjoern’s Wireless Work In Progress landing page URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~bz/wireless/
Realtek rtw88 status FreeBSD wiki page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Rtw88
Realtek rtw89 status FreeBSD wiki page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Rtw89
MediaTek mt76 status FreeBSD wiki page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Mt76
QCA ath11k status FreeBSD wiki page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Ath11k

Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>

Currently development is mostly driven by Intel’s iwlwifi driver again (see other report). As the saying goes ''each one helps the other'' so has work on Realtek’s rtw89 driver helped find a bug in LinuxKPI bothering iwlwifi users. For this status report the topic is mostly more drivers, which do need more LinuxKPI support.

Various work in progress:

  • Realtek’s rtw88 PCI is in-tree as-is and after a fruitful discussion with Hans Petter Selasky at EuroBSDCon work on LinuxKPI USB support for the rtw88 USB WiFi dongles will continue.

  • Realtek’s rtw89 driver was committed to main but is not connected to the build yet. Scanning already works but packets are not yet passing. Having the driver in-tree already eased testing for users having that chipset in order to identify more unimplemented LinuxKPI bits (some of which will help the other drivers as well) and reduced work for me.

  • The next drivers to probably hit the tree will be based on MediaTek’s mt76 driver (for 7921 and 7915) which I have compiling and started testing.

  • Based on requests I am also working on ath11k to support STA mode given some vendors seem to ship Laptops with those chips.

While some of this clearly benefits from work sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation for iwlwifi and newer standard support, a lot of this is just free-time work. If you are interested in any of these drivers I would greatly appreciate if some more hands would help with one or the other. This could be regularly testing updates to main, writing documentation and updating wiki pages, tracking PRs, trying out patches, helping with work on individual LinuxKPI bits with or without 802.11 work, or simply debugging problems with individual drivers and/or chipsets. If you are interested in helping with any one of the above, please drop me an email.

For the latest state of the development, please follow the freebsd-wireless mailing list and check the wiki pages (as soon as they exist).

Last modified on: October 20, 2022 by Maxim Konovalov