Comment by PunchyHamster
12 hours ago
> 9/10
> half of networking doesnt work, and it's the more important one for laptop(wifi)
I think they need to revise the scoring
12 hours ago
> 9/10
> half of networking doesnt work, and it's the more important one for laptop(wifi)
I think they need to revise the scoring
It seems like the best way to get WiFi working in FreeBSD is to run Linux in bhyve and tunnel your connections through there.
That kind of seems crazy to me, considering OpenBSD has worked perfectly fine with every wifi capable device I've tested it on. Granted, most of them were older machines.
Is this just an artifact of FreeBSD primarily focusing on server hardware rather than consumer/end-user stuff?
Basically no one supports Broadcom SoftMAC WiFi cards very well, but OpenBSD just doesn't. I have a 2015 MacBook Air with a BCM4350 where the recommended fix is to go buy a FullMAC card from a similar vintage MacBook Pro and just cope with the fact that the card barely fits in the case and can't be secured properly.
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FreeBSD 15 has done a lot for WiFi apparently.
I'm not sure how good it is as I don't use wifi but it's supposed to be much better.
It seems the best way to get WiFi working is to run Linux and FreeBSD in a VM..
the fact that this is a widely accepted/encouraged practice is genuinely unhinged
Why? Nothing wrong with running your network interface in a VM. There are reasons for doing so even if drivers aren't an issue. Qubes OS does this, for instance, for security reasons.
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Not really weird when some firmware are close to being full blown OS. An alpine VM can be run with 64 MB which is lower than a lot of software.
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I agree that 9/10 is a bit of a strange score there, but it's not all that bad: You can get a $15 wifi dongle and use that instead. It occupies a USB port and looks a bit ugly, but it's still a fairly easy workaround.
Is there a cheap, common USB wifi dongle that works?
In the old days I kept a couple Realtek USB adapters around that would almost always work out of the box or with ndiswrapper
No need to get a USB dongle. You can use PCI passthrough to a Linux VM that has the Wifi driver.
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704816
I'd like to know more about what it takes to turn on PCI pass through for laptop hardware. On desktops and servers it's typically the IOMMU setting in the BIOS. Is that also commonly available on laptops?
That's insanely complicated compared to plugging in a USB dongle.
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FreeBSD WiFi is certainly fun.
Some years ago, I was workig with FreeBSD on an old laptop. The laptop had a wireless adapter that ostensible should be supported, but was not.
After some digging, I realized the driver was just missing some PCIe device identifiers. I added them to driver and bam my WiFi is working without issue.
I tried to submit a bug report and patch, and it got positive feedback at first any changes even got committed. But then I learned why it’s better to not even try.
Apparently this was a known issue, but only in the heads of the FreeBSD wireless developers. They had their reasons for not adding the device, but the reasons did not appear to be documented in mailing lists or docs until my thread. At that point I realized it’s not worth it to try and contribute to such large projects as I just lack the decades of institutional knowledge of the system.
Anyway, I’m not sure it ever got released. I believe there’s an umbrella bug somewhere left after the version my patch supported went out of support.
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