
I'm back into the grind of FreeBSD's wireless stack and 802.11ac - rodrigo975
https://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2020/07/im-back-into-grind-of-freebsds-wireless.html
======
elagost
The way I got started with Linux, even in the early 2000s, was blowing away
the Windows install on my laptop and installing Ubuntu. Out of the box
everything worked (but the laptop was ancient and didn't have wifi, so that
didn't have the opportunity to break) and besides the weird problems with alsa
and xorg that were endemic to those days, I had no issues.

A few months ago I tried to install FreeBSD on a spare 5+yr old laptop.
FreeBSD doesn't show boot messages (display goes all wonky) and it can't
detect half the hardware (network, disks, others). Seems like it's a decade or
two behind hardware support on Linux.

Is there a vendor that sells good FreeBSD desktop-enabled systems, i.e.
system76 for Linux? I'm now at a point that I'm more than willing to jump into
using a BSD desktop, I just want something that works. Alternatively, is there
a FreeBSD-based OS that is Ubuntu-like - includes a bunch of drivers and gives
me a decent desktop out of the box?

(also, as an aside, the fact that the bus factor of FreeBSD's wifi stack seems
like it's 1 reminds me of libinput on Linux.)

~~~
centimeter
As a contrast, I was recently setting up an APU2 system as a router. I tried 3
different kinds of Linux (OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Debian), and they were all horribly
broken in different ways - Ubuntu wouldn’t even show comprehensible boot
messages over the serial port.

I tried FreeBSD, and it booted perfectly the first time and all the hardware
worked properly.

I think FreeBSD is just a lot more focused on server/infrastructure hardware.

~~~
pstrateman
For some reason Linux distros mostly default to not sending anything over the
serial port, even when they can't find a video device.

To get everything you need to have GRUB, the kernel, and inittab configured to
use the serial port.

Once you've done that it all works, but yeah annoying.

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qalmakka
This is good news; FreeBSD's wifi/bluetooth stack definitely more love and a
bit of polishing. The last time I tried using Intel wifi on FreeBSD the driver
kept trying to use wrong tx settings without allowing me to change them,
leading to slow performance and poor signal (the same card under Linux/Windows
had excellent signal from the same AP).

~~~
cpach
What is the cause of this situation? Is it simply that commercial entities
using FreeBSD does not have wifi as a requirement? (E.g. companies using
FreeBSD in server environments.)

~~~
kelp
In many cases, like say the intel WiFi drivers on Linux, the driver is written
by Intel employees.

The BSDs don’t have the critical mass to get this vendor support. For example,
much of the intel WiFi work on OpenBSD is done by one person, Stephan
Sperling, on a volunteer basis.

I only mention intel in the above examples because that’s what’s in the
Thinkpad I had that didn’t have support yet. So I looked into the driver
situation on Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

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ashafer
Glad to see progress on FreeBSD wifi again!

One interesting workaround I saw recently was to pass an 802.11ac device to
linux running in bhyve. I have yet to try it, but it seems like potentially
the best short-term solution if you have a bsd laptop where wifi is the only
thing not supported.

[https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
hackers/2020-Jun...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
hackers/2020-June/056170.html)

~~~
dddddaviddddd
bhyve PCI passthrough worked great for me, but couldn't handle suspend-resume
of the host. Less than ideal for a laptop.
[https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/t480-bhyve-wifi-pci-
pas...](https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/t480-bhyve-wifi-pci-passthrough)

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varbhat
I installed FreeBSD few days back. Unfortunately, it didn't support i2c
trackpad of my laptop and my network module(WiFi and Bluetooth didn't work).

But,it's great OS for Server though.

~~~
markjdb
A driver is in ports while the author works on getting it ready to import.
Just pkg install iichid.

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rjeli
rip ath9k. it was too good for us <3

~~~
dehrmann
I haven't looked into this recently, but for a long time, I'd only buy Atheros
cards, even for Windows machines, because I'd have an option of Windows
support, and the Windows drivers always seemed less finicky. I think Windows
even shipped with Atheros drivers, and Microsoft drivers tend to be more
reliable than vendor ones.

------
dddddaviddddd
Happy to see progress on this. Working from home, I'm using an Ethernet
connection, but hopefully 802.11ac will be ready by the time I'm mobile again.

