802.11ac driver

atayozcan

Hi is there any way to use 802.11ac wifi card on FreeBSD 12? The 802.11ac option in wpa_supplicant port doesn't compile.

Jay

atayozcan what's output for ?

#sysctl net.wlan.devices

JuvenalUrbino

atayozcan Hi is there any way to use 802.11ac wifi card on FreeBSD 12?

Hi, unfortunately support for IEEE 802.11ac on FreeBSD is still at it's very early stages and nowhere close to be of any use in everyday computing. 802.11n support is pretty decent though, depending on driver;

atayozcan The 802.11ac option in wpa_supplicant port doesn't compile.

What do you mean by 'compile'? wpa_supplicant is already found in base ?

atayozcan net.wlan.devices:

which suggests that, roughly in order of likelihood:

no driver supports your wifi NIC on FreeBSD yet (providing your device is 802.11n/g -compliant, you may try with either 13:HEAD/CURRENT experimental branch, or OpenBSD, which is often ahead when it comes to wifi)
the suitable driver exists, but it's not compiled by default in the monolithic GENERIC kernel config, rather needs to be loaded as dynamically linked module, either at boot, by adding it to your loader(8) config or using kldload(8) command
the device needs firmware to be injected and/or a license agreement to be signed, in order for the driver to be loaded
driver exists but it's 3rd party and needs to be installed from ports

Should any of those possibilities reflect your current situation, as you may have guessed, it all depends on the device's specs; we thereby need at least a unique model and vendor, so if you're unsure which chipset is your NIC is based upon, please look for it both within your dmesg(8) and the output of pciconf -lv, see pciconf(8); then report here by including the respective relevant sections ?

atayozcan

net.wlan.devices:

atayozcan

JuvenalUrbino Thanks a lot! ? Here is my output of pciconf -lv | grep -B3 network

none4@pci0:3:0:0:	class=0x028000 card=0x0156106b chip=0x43ba14e4 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
vendor     = 'Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries'
device     = 'BCM43602 802.11ac Wireless LAN SoC'
class      = network

and here is my dmesg output: https://paste.ee/p/UlCa4

JuvenalUrbino

atayozcan

Looking for the chipset id and vendor, It seems you have a PCIe FullMAC Broadcom BCM943602CS WLAN+ Bluetooth Combination Card.

This is not supported in FreeBSD yet, but I'm positive it should work well on both OpenBSD (since 6.4) and NetBSD (starting with 8.1), following the addition of the new bwfm(4) driver; Should your choice fall on NetBSD, beware 8.1 hasn't been released yet, but will likely be in few days (currently in testing stage, at 8.1-RC1). Respective -current branches naturally provide the driver too.

Here's in fact the relevant man pages:

bwfm(4) on OpenBSD
bwfm(4) on NetBSD

While taking a look at if_bwfm_pci.c, I see:

static const struct bwfm_pci_matchid {
	pci_vendor_id_t		bwfm_vendor;
	pci_product_id_t	bwfm_product;
} bwfm_pci_devices[] = {
	{ PCI_VENDOR_BROADCOM, PCI_PRODUCT_BROADCOM_BCM43602 },
	{ PCI_VENDOR_BROADCOM, PCI_PRODUCT_BROADCOM_BCM4350 },
};

atayozcan

JuvenalUrbino Does any other BSD provide bwfm or it's just OpenBSD and NetBSD?

atayozcan There're basically four BSDs. You have support for your card on Open and the release candidate of Net, that's 50% coverage ?
You could always check DragonFly on an usb.

JuvenalUrbino

atayozcan Does any other BSD provide bwfm or it's just OpenBSD and NetBSD?

Unfortunately it seems FreeBSD's Broadcom wireless developer isn't working on FullMAC yet

pin You could always check DragonFly on an usb

As far as I can tell, my understanding is that, due to the limited manpower, there's things that DragonFly never really cared about, regarding which has always rather waited for FreeBSD to do the job, thus to port it afterwards: one of those seems to be wireless support ?

JuvenalUrbino

pin There're basically four BSDs

To expand on this, there's also other more obscure BSD branches, but they fit very small and specific niches and are extremely unlikely to be ahead in terms of hardware and software support:

RetroBSD, actively maintained port/reshape of 2.1BSD UNIX™ for embedded MIPS SoCs, targeting developers
MidnightBSD actively maintained FreeBSD fork (like DragonFly) targeting Unix power users as a lightweight, retrioish, desktop-oriented platform
PureDarwin experimental libre fork of XNU/Darwin (NeXTSTEP core) from OS X 10.7, borrowing ideas from the defunct NeXTBSD and using the Macports framework
MirOS, from the creator of mksh shell and jupp editor, was (now discontinued, and archived...Thorsten, the creator, went rather developing Debian with a focus on m68k and other legacy platforms, while B.Siegert, the other main dev, remained developing pkgsrc for NetBSD) a OpenBSD hard fork, importing a lot of newer NetBSD code too, and targeting old archs like Intel 486 and sparc32, noticeably refusing to implement SMP

Practically all other FOSS BSDs in existence (active and discontinued) are only redistributions ('spins') or soft forks of the aforementioned 4 major BSDs, in parallel synchronous development with the parent project