Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: The FreeBSD wireless mailing list <wireless@FreeBSD.org>

With multiple wireless projects ongoing, this report focuses on the efforts using permissively licensed Linux wireless drivers mostly unmodified on FreeBSD. The currently supported drivers are iwlwifi(4), rtw88(4), and rtw89(4).

The rtw88(4) driver was made to work (associate) again (Bugzilla PR#283142). In addition, thanks to the massive help debugging and testing by the community, the cause for leaking memory got resolved (Bugzilla PR#283903).

Tunables to selectively control HT and VHT support in rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) were added. HW crypto offload was enabled by default for CCMP. It turns out that a lot of users are still using TKIP. Work is in on the way to support this and will hopefully land early in Q2.

HT (11n) and VHT (11ac) support are now also compiled in by default for the LinuxKPI based drivers. The drivers and entire framework changes were merged from main to stable/14 so both branches have the same level of support.

People installing firmware using fwget(8) will get HT and VHT automatically enabled for iwlwifi(4) 2200 (mostly AX200), AX210, and BE200 chipset generations. Older iwlwifi(4) chipset generations, rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) will need extra work in LinuxKPI or the driver to provide working support.

It was announced that iwlwififw(4) will follow rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) firmware and be removed from the base system in April 2025 for both main and stable/14 in favor of the ports based solution and fwget(8) support (Announcement).

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation