FreeBSD 15 - iwm wifi - hello 2005 speeds...

A

ahhyes

Not much to say really except "DISAPPOINTING".... Decided to try out v15 on a Thinkpad T480s

From the iwm() man-page:
BUGS
Currently, iwm only supports 802.11a/b/g modes. It will not associate
to access points that are configured to operate only in 802.11n/ac
modes.
Click to expand...
And yup, surely enough ifconfig shows that I am stuck in 2005 speed mode.
I am guessing nobody is interested in fixing this iwm "BUG" either..

The speeds are so awful I have to put youtube into < 1080p so it wont buffer all the time.
 
I do not know what wifi card is in T480S. i have T480 ( not S ). it had intel 8265 wifi card. i just swapped it for intel ax210 wifi and new iwx driver that is in 15 gives fantastic speed.
 
One thing I spotted also in the ifconfig output was OFDM/36. Using -powersave to turn off powersaving changed that to OFDM/54 but the speeds still max out at around 2.3MB/s - awful.
I guess that driver is just horrible :/
 
angry_vincent said:
I do not know what wifi card is in T480S. i have T480 ( not S ). it had intel 8265 wifi card. i just swapped it for intel ax210 wifi and new iwx driver that is in 15 gives fantastic speed.
Click to expand...
ahhhhhhh - thank you - this might be my way out of the problem - I see them on ebay for cheap.
 
If you decide to go with iwx driver and new card then make sure you blacklisted both iwm and if_iwlwifi drivers as the latter one has precedence over iwx. and install iwlwifi-ax210 firmware ( i cannot tell exact pkg name out of my head - pkg search can give it ).
 
I don't remember well, but iwm is used for old hardware and is not compatible with ac speed.
Indeed, that's easier to switch to an AX210.
You might check if your current wifi card has the correct driver and firmware, mine stayed on 14.3 version even after 15.0 upgrade - it did work but I was running strange behaviour before noticying the version mismatch.
 
My Thinkpad, T495, has an Intel card that doesn't get the newer speeds. It has an AC9x6x card. But I also have a Beelink SER5, with an AX200 Intel card, and that one has wireless speeds equal to the speed in Linux.
 
Perceval said:
I don't remember well, but iwm is used for old hardware and is not compatible with ac speed.
Indeed, that's easier to switch to an AX210.
You might check if your current wifi card has the correct driver and firmware, mine stayed on 14.3 version even after 15.0 upgrade - it did work but I was running strange behaviour before noticying the version mismatch.
Click to expand...
It's not all _that_ old (the 8265); certainly capable of more than 'g' speeds and has a 5Ghz radio :) I had been using Linux on this same laptop with the 8265 that is on it and was getting 300Mbit speeds - nice and fast and very usable - far far better than what the iwm driver on FreeBSD is giving me (which is permanently stuck in 'g' mode due its limitations/bugs) and only able to achieve throughput of 2.3MB/s (which is making the task of trying to rsync a big load of data onto the laptop painful also)

I have an AX210 wifi module on the way so hopefully it will improve the experience.
 
The 8265 is 802.11ac capable actually - so no idea why the iwm driver is used for driving this hardware since it has nasty limitations
 
ahhyes said:
The 8265 is 802.11ac capable actually - so no idea why the iwm driver is used for driving this hardware since it has nasty limitations
Click to expand...
That is correct however iwm driver has no 802.11ac support for the card . I used net/wifibox to workaround this limitation it is fantastic piece of software. but getting newer card and using new driver is much easier. I am little bit grumpy about the state of matter as OpenBSD ( iwx is their original work ) is way better in certain hardware support. their drm drivers are also much newer.it would ne nice to have some sort of work for gpu drivers like with iwx.
 
ahhyes said:
It's not all _that_ old (the 8265); certainly capable of more than 'g' speeds and has a 5Ghz radio :) I had been using Linux on this same laptop with the 8265 that is on it and was getting 300Mbit speeds - nice and fast and very usable - far far better than what the iwm driver on FreeBSD is giving me (which is permanently stuck in 'g' mode due its limitations/bugs) and only able to achieve throughput of 2.3MB/s (which is making the task of trying to rsync a big load of data onto the laptop painful also)

I have an AX210 wifi module on the way so hopefully it will improve the experience.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I wasn't saying the Wifi card was old, I was talking about iwm(4).
I changed my thinkpad's 8265 to an AX210, I can't remember which driver was used, but it seems that the 8265 is compatible with iwlwifi(4) according to this: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Iwlwifi
Quoted (please note this is an old written stuff, the AC speed might be fine today ?):
Code: 
Testing
I have an iwm(4) supported device and want to try iwlwifi(4)
If you have an iwm(4) supported device, you will need to detach the iwm(4) and attach iwlwifi. Please check pciconf -l for your wireless device and remember (or copy and paste later) the first bit.

% pciconf -l | grep iwm
iwm0@pci0:3:0:0:        class=0x028000 rev=0x78 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x8086 device=0x24fd subvendor=0x8086 subdevice=0x0010

After loading the iwlwifi kernel module run the following commands (replacing the device selector with what you found for your computer):

devctl detach pci0:3:0:0
devctl set driver pci0:3:0:0 iwlwifi

That should do the trick.

To ensure that iwlwifi(4) is loaded after subsequent reboots, disable the automatic loading of iwm(4) by devmatch(8). Add the following to /boot/loader.conf:

devmatch_blocklist="if_iwm"
 
My T460 has an AC8260.

On 15 it didn’t even try to load with iwm. I simply added “devmatch_blocklist=“if_iwm” and it auto loaded the iwlwifi with a/c mode.
 
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