Links:
Bjoern’s Wireless Work In Progress landing page URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~bz/wireless/

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

During the quarter not much work was publicly visible and admittedly slightly slow. Behind the scenes wireless work was happening on two fronts:

While the main development for newer standards and the Intel iwlwifi driver is sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, I find myself spending a lot of private time with Realtek rtw88 and rtw89, Atheros, and Mediatek mt76 (7921 and 7915) drivers now as well. Testing changes on bare metal and using bhyve VMs using passthru has become more time-consuming, with the amount of supported chipsets increasing, in order not to break other drivers. Even different (generations of) chipsets supported by the same driver, at times, behave differently with the same change.

A separate discussion was brought to me about the size of firmware added to the tree for the already existing drivers and the firmware for more drivers coming. The chicken-egg problem to solve is having firmware available on the release media; without firmware, a lot of modern laptops will not have any sort of outside communications available at the time of install in their default configuration. This will be a larger discussion to have to also solve firmware for other drivers, but that discussion will be for another day and place.

Slightly belatedly I have started to push LinuxKPI and 802.11 changes into the tree at the end of the year and that work will continue into early 2023 at which point more of the aforementioned remaining drivers will also hit the tree.

One of the main remaining problems to solve is the firmware crashes on interface down/up cycles currently experienced with at least two drivers.

Thankfully during the last weeks, after my call for help, multiple people have stood up wanting to help with various drivers (especially Realtek and Mediatek). I hope that after me catching up and pushing things out this can accelerate progress again.

Thanks again to everyone doing testing, providing debug output, sending in feedback, or using the drivers at this point.

For the latest state of the development, please use the freebsd-wireless mailing list, and check the landing page, which has links to all wiki pages for each driver status.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation