Installed 14.3-BETA2 no improvement in wireless

S

scottro

Like the subject line says, I installed 14.3-BETA2 using freebsd-update. This is on a Thinkpad L420. Running pciconf -lv shows the wireless card as Wi-Fi 5(802.11ac) Wireless-AC 9x6x [Thunder Peak]'

I had hoped that wireless speed would improve, but perhaps this Intel card isn't covered. Or maybe it won't happen till release though the mailing list announcement that I saw https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-stable/2025-May/002817.html
said various wifi fixes. If anyone else has installed 14.3-BETA2 have they noticed any improvement in wireless speed?

I will repeat what I've said in various posts about FreeBSD wireless, even with the relatively slow speed, youtube videos are still fine.
 
From what I've been following on the mailing list, it is currently only the Intel AX and BE Wi-Fi chips that are getting the speed boosts. From Bjoern Zeeb's latest update:

Older iwlwifi and 11ac:
- that's something to be discussed; the original code is GPL-only
upstream; we neither have the (full) functionality in iwm or iwx
to lift it from there. It's a few Kloc. Problem is there's plenty
of 8xxx and 9xxx cards out there still with FreeBSD users. I'll
need to see. Ran an experiment with one of you (thanks a lot!)
Click to expand...

May be a while before we get support for the older cards. I'm about to buy a couple of AX210 cards to test in my own laptops, as they all have 9xxx or 8xxx chips.
 
Reading this I can’t find a list of supported chips involved in the “speed improvement”?

Could someone kindly point me in the right direction?

I’ve got a few thinkpads I’d like to test with.

Thanks!
 
All the work is being done in -CURRENT, as it should be. New features, like new drivers, are never MFCed back to stable, else it would be considered unstable.

Grab a 15-CURRENT snapshot.
 
rshad muhammad said:
I m running 14.3-STABLE n have Comet Lake PCH-LP CNVi WiFi, iwlwifi. i dont see any improvement so far. maybe mine still not covered yet.
Click to expand...
The 14 branch will not receive the new drivers. There are two reasons for this:

New drivers risk breaking STABLE.

New drivers are written using interfaces found only in CURRENT. Drivers are not the only thing being developed. When they are added they make use of features and facilities found only in CURRENT. MFC of significant chunks of code, like a driver, usually requires an MFC of supporting code which in turn relies on other code that must also be MFCed. These dependency chains are at times unavoidable. As such, MFC dependency chains like this to STABLE may ultimately require a wholesale upgrade of STABLE to CURRENT. It wouldn't be stable then. Would it?

For those of you who are adventurous installing CURRENT on a spare partition or spare disk will give you a taste of what is coming through the pipeline. And BTW, 15-CURRENT is scheduled to become 15.0-RELEASE sometime this summer.
 
Thanks cy@. I think I'm going to do that on the laptop and see what happens. If I do (also feeling incredibly lazy), I'll update.
 
cy@ said:
And BTW, 15-CURRENT is scheduled to become 15.0-RELEASE sometime this summer.
Click to expand...
Code slush in August. Release itself is currently scheduled for early December:
www.freebsd.org

FreeBSD 15.0 Release Process

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org
First beta builds should appear in October.
 
So, will the improvements in 15-RELEASE be for all Intel cards, or only for the AX ones that jardows mentioned above? As my laptop's card isn't included it in that, I'll probably indulge my usual laziness and wait for 15-RELEASE.
 
Ohh...kay. I used my Beelink, which has an AX200. I thought I might have to try a CURRENT snapshot, but I was able to just use freebsd-update -r to 14.3-BETA3 and I'm getting the same speeds as Linux when copying over the LAN and similar speeds to wired when downloading. So, I'm happy. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top