Testing mt76 before committing to installation

hunter0one

hunter0one

I would like to start using FreeBSD on my desktop PC again but there's a minor issue. I started using a Mediatek MT7921 802.11ax PCI Wi-Fi card which tremendously improved my network speed (before I was using one of those ethernet-powerline adapter which utilize the X10 protocol and it wasn't the fastest). I was a bit delighted to see a driver called mt76 in the FreeBSD source tree that matches the PCI ID of my card though it appears to not be compiled in 15.x-RELEASE.

Before fully committing to a FreeBSD desktop, I would like to build and test this module. I would like to see if it works and if so then how well it works. I am unable to make the FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Live DVD read-writable. I am using Ventoy but I believe its the same issue on USB. I have GhostBSD on another USB which is able to boot and has a read-write ready environment but is on 15.0-RELEASE, and upon checking out the releng/15.0 source tree there is an error building the module because it seems to be missing this commit made in 15.1 (essentially if I try to build mt76, I get a fatal error: 'net/page_pool.h' file not found error).

Ideally I should be testing a regular FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE environment since that is what I'd be using anyway. Does anyone know how to make the 15.1-RELEASE live environment read-writable?
 
hunter0one said:
I am unable to make the FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Live DVD read-writable.
Click to expand...
That's not possible, because the optical discs file system is read-only, it can't be made read-write. To get the driver (or any file for that matter) on a .iso disc image, one must extract the .iso image, add the files, recreate the .iso image. How to do this is explained in bsdinstall(8), section BUILDING AUTOMATIC INSTALL MEDIA.

It's easier with an .img image. dd(1) the image on USB, mount the USB, add files. Or, mdconfig(8) the image as a memory disk, mount the system root partition (mdXs2a), add files.

But that's not the problem. The problem is:
hunter0one said:
Ideally I should be testing a regular FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE environment since that is what I'd be using anyway.
Click to expand...
15.1-RELEASE ( releng/15.1 ) is not supported (yet). For the time being, you need 15.1-STABLE or 16.0-CURRENT to test the driver.

See freebsd-wirless@FreeBSD.org mailing list archive How to test MediaTek mt7921! from 2026-07-28 and follow up Re: How to test MediaTek mt7921!.

For general information, see FreeBSD wiki MediaTek mt76 .

If you need help in building and testing the driver, subscribe to the wireless mailing list. The driver developer ( Bjoern A. Zeeb ) welcomes all users for testing and is supportive in guiding them.
 
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