100% Supported WiFi mini pcie cards

[chuckbird]

Hello,

can you please write here what mini pci WiFi card do you use that is 100% compatible with FreeBSD 14 in both 2.4Ghz and 5ghz Mode?

My laptop comes with an Intel AX200 WiFi 6 card that is seemingly only half supported as it cannot discover wlans other than 2.4Ghz ones.

Thanks who might help.

 

[nxjoseph]

Hi. I was installed FreeBSD 13.2 to my sisters' old notebook and it's wifi card was a BCM4313 which is an unsupported card and I replaced it with an Atheros AR9462 wifi card. This card supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. It was running in 802.11na mode, the speeds i got are below, they are my actual internet speeds. It does have bluetooth too but i didn't try it's bluetooth. I would recommend you to buy this card.

This is the hw-probe of the notebook.

HW probe of Dell Inspiron N5010 #b32ded6bb9

A database of all the hardware that works under bsd

bsd-hardware.info

wlan0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
    ether XXX
    inet XXX netmask XXX broadcast XXX
    groups: ...
    ssid ... channel 52 (5260 MHz 11a ht/40+) bssid XXX
    regdomain 106 indoor ecm authmode WPA2/802.11i privacy ON
    deftxkey UNDEF AES-CCM 2:128-bit txpower 30 bmiss 7 mcastrate 6
    mgmtrate 6 scanvalid 60 ampdulimit 64k ampdudensity 4 shortgi -uapsd
    wme burst roaming MANUAL
    parent interface: ath0
    media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet MCS mode 11na
    status: associated
    nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

You can see the atheros hardware supports here.

dev/ath_hal(4)/HardwareSupport - FreeBSD Wiki

 

[canihazsekooriti]

I'm running an ath AR9287 card in Access Point mode, and it's alright speed. Mine and nxjoseph's cards have only 2 antennas, though. You want a 3 antenna card to max your speed. You can get some cheap ones online.

 

[HenryHu]

My motherboard came with an AX211 Wifi 6E card, and it's supported by the iwlwifi driver:

Intel(R) Wireless WiFi based driver for FreeBSD
iwlwifi0: <iwlwifi> mem 0x4016224000-0x4016227fff at device 20.3 on pci0
iwlwifi0: Detected crf-id 0x400410, cnv-id 0x80401 wfpm id 0x80000020
iwlwifi0: PCI dev 7a70/0094, rev=0x430, rfid=0x2010d000
iwlwifi0: successfully loaded firmware image 'iwlwifi-so-a0-gf-a0-83.ucode'
iwlwifi0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver
iwlwifi0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.0.2.41
iwlwifi0: loaded firmware version 83.e8f84e98.0 so-a0-gf-a0-83.ucode op_mode iwlmvm
iwlwifi0: Detected Intel(R) Wi-Fi 6E AX211 160MHz, REV=0x430
iwlwifi0: WRT: Invalid buffer destination
iwlwifi0: WFPM_UMAC_PD_NOTIFICATION: 0x20
iwlwifi0: WFPM_LMAC2_PD_NOTIFICATION: 0x1f
iwlwifi0: WFPM_AUTH_KEY_0: 0x90
iwlwifi0: CNVI_SCU_SEQ_DATA_DW9: 0x0
iwlwifi0: successfully loaded firmware image 'iwlwifi-so-a0-gf-a0.pnvm'
iwlwifi0: loaded PNVM version 181407b3
iwlwifi0: RFIm is deactivated, reason = 5
iwlwifi0: Detected RF GF, rfid=0x2010d000
iwlwifi0: base HW address: ...
iwlwifi0: WRT: Invalid buffer destination
iwlwifi0: WFPM_UMAC_PD_NOTIFICATION: 0x20
iwlwifi0: WFPM_LMAC2_PD_NOTIFICATION: 0x1f
iwlwifi0: WFPM_AUTH_KEY_0: 0x90
iwlwifi0: CNVI_SCU_SEQ_DATA_DW9: 0x0
iwlwifi0: RFIm is deactivated, reason = 5

It seems like that it can find 2.4G networks just fine?

> ifconfig wlan0 scan | grep henryhu
henryhu-2G ... 1 54M -41:-96 100 EP RSN BSSLOAD HTCAP WPS WPA WME
henryhu ... 149 54M -43:-96 100 EP RSN BSSLOAD HTCAP VHTCAP VHTOPMODE VHTPWRENV WPS WME