Intel Wireless 3160 NIC Not Getting Picked Up in FreeBSD

[groovemonkey]

Hi there,

I'm trying to set up FreeBSD as a laptop OS on a 2013/14 System76 Kudu. The wireless card is an "Intel Wireless 3160" card, officially called the "Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160" on Intel's site. I didn't see any FreeBSD drivers there.

Linux picks this up as (lspci):

04:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 3160 (rev 83)

When I try the FreeBSD command pciconf -lv, it doesn't even find a name or a manufacturer in the database (the output for the WiFi card is the same as if I didn't use the -v flag). I also don't see it recognized as a NIC in dmesg.

I've tried using the intel firmware/drivers by editing /boot/loader.conf:

legal.intel_iwn.license_ack=1
if_iwn_load="YES"
if_iwnfw_load="YES"
wlan_wep_load="YES"
wlan_ccmp_load="YES"
wlan_tkip_load="YES"

and then editing /etc/rc.conf :

wlans_iwn0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPAN DHCP"

When I reboot and run ifconfig -a, I don't see a wlan0 interface anywhere.

Is there anything else I could try? (I briefly tried using non-Intel drivers; predictably, that didn't work). I'm a systemd-refugee from the Linux world, and I'd love to make FreeBSD my primary OS on this laptop. Any help would be massively appreciated.

Cheers!

 

[Juanitou]

I fear it’s not going to work, have you checked the manual pages for these Intel drivers? Maybe you should post to the FreeBSD-wireless list or file a PR. There is a recent message by Adrian Chadd, the most active person recently in wireless support for FreeBSD (please correct me if I’m wrong), on the effort of creating and maintaining wireless drivers…

 

[groovemonkey]

Thank you!

It's ok, I'll just use an old laptop to play around with FreeBSD. Too bad, I wanted to make it my primary OS (in time for the new edition of the "Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System").

Cheers!