Howdy folks, this is my first time being here, and I have quite the conundrum.
I've tried installing FreeBSD on several different computers, however, I have ran into the same issue several times. A lot of computers I have tried to install freebsd on have a wifi card that is recognized as 'RTW880'. I'm not exactly sure if they are all the same, but on this computer which I am writing from, the true name of the card is called "Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8821CE 802.11ac" and when it tries to connect to the internet it spits out an 'error 95' with the wpa_supplicant. I don't currently have FreeBSD installed on anything (unfortunately), so I will update this with the exact error when I try to run the installer on something later.
I have learned online that the necessary driver to make the wificard work does seem to be pre-installed on dvd1 installation media, and I have found that if I start the installer and go into the shell before beginning the actual install process and type 'pkg install wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod' or 'pkg install net/wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod', it will then connect to wifi during the installation (despite spitting out many errors about being unable to find the relevant FreeBSD repositories) until the first reboot after installation completes (although, I should say that this doesn't always work, working about 90% of the time).
The question then becomes how do I make the wifi-card start working again after installation? It's hard to look for help because a lot of other information that I have found tends to be very old, sometimes going as far back as FreeBSD 13, like here The wiki says that it's a ram issue, which does seem to track with the computers I have worked on, as all of them have been more than 4gb ram. It says to add 'compat.linuxkpi.skb.mem_limit=1' to loader.conf, but this doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe linuxulator might help? And from an older post here it suggests to check if the if_rtw88.ko is loaded, and I did check, and it was, so I can't say why it's not being 'attached' to the card. I've also found other sources that suggest trying to add a whole bunch of other tuneables, but those don't seem to do anything either.
I realize that this may not be the most the most complete info, but I hope this is enough to get started atleast, and I'll post that information later and any other information you guys think might be useful.
Thank you so much!
I've tried installing FreeBSD on several different computers, however, I have ran into the same issue several times. A lot of computers I have tried to install freebsd on have a wifi card that is recognized as 'RTW880'. I'm not exactly sure if they are all the same, but on this computer which I am writing from, the true name of the card is called "Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8821CE 802.11ac" and when it tries to connect to the internet it spits out an 'error 95' with the wpa_supplicant. I don't currently have FreeBSD installed on anything (unfortunately), so I will update this with the exact error when I try to run the installer on something later.
I have learned online that the necessary driver to make the wificard work does seem to be pre-installed on dvd1 installation media, and I have found that if I start the installer and go into the shell before beginning the actual install process and type 'pkg install wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod' or 'pkg install net/wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod', it will then connect to wifi during the installation (despite spitting out many errors about being unable to find the relevant FreeBSD repositories) until the first reboot after installation completes (although, I should say that this doesn't always work, working about 90% of the time).
The question then becomes how do I make the wifi-card start working again after installation? It's hard to look for help because a lot of other information that I have found tends to be very old, sometimes going as far back as FreeBSD 13, like here The wiki says that it's a ram issue, which does seem to track with the computers I have worked on, as all of them have been more than 4gb ram. It says to add 'compat.linuxkpi.skb.mem_limit=1' to loader.conf, but this doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe linuxulator might help? And from an older post here it suggests to check if the if_rtw88.ko is loaded, and I did check, and it was, so I can't say why it's not being 'attached' to the card. I've also found other sources that suggest trying to add a whole bunch of other tuneables, but those don't seem to do anything either.
I realize that this may not be the most the most complete info, but I hope this is enough to get started atleast, and I'll post that information later and any other information you guys think might be useful.
Thank you so much!