WiFi Not Working Upgrading to FreeBSD 14.3 on ThinkPad W520

[osalbahr]

Hello, on June 14 I upgraded to FreeBSD 14.3 and WiFi stopped working. I know it is due to the upgrade because reverting back to 14.2 WiFi does work. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad W520.

When running `dhclient wlan0` as root I get `wlan0: no link .............. giving up`.

And in Xfce, hovering over the internet icon (Network Manager) I get "Network card is not enabled" and sometimes "WiFi wlan0 not connected".

What can I try to fix this issue? I can connect to Ethernet just fine.

I did try running `fwget` as was suggested in the Discord:

```console
# fwget
No package found for device 0x0126
No firmware packages to install.
```

 

[T-Daemon]

FreeBSD 14.3 and WiFi stopped working.

Perhaps it's a wifi firmware issue. If the wifi device requires a firmware package installed, it may need 14.3 package version.

Since >=14.3 FreeBSD package repositories offer a special minor version kernel modules and firmware until the previous version reaches end-of-life (14.2 here in this case). See /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf for "FreeBSD-kmods" or execute pkg repos.

Try

# pkg info  | grep wifi-firmware

Delete the firmware package and install again

# pkg install -r FreeBSD-kmod wifi-firmware-xxx-kmod

replace xxx with driver name (i.e. wifi-firmware-iwlwifi-kmod)

If this doesn't restore wifi, or gkg info doesn't return a result, show us sysctl net.wlan.devices

 

[osalbahr]

root@red:~ # pkg info | grep wifi-firmware
root@red:~ # sysctl net.wlan.devices
net.wlan.devices: iwn0

 

[T-Daemon]

net.wlan.devices: iwn0

iwn(4) doesn't need a 3rd party firmware package, the firmware is in base (/boot/kernel/iwnXXXXfw.ko. It is loaded automatically.

Check dmesg(8) for "iwn0" and "wlan0" messages: dmesg | grep -e wlan0 -e iwn0

See also handbook 7.7.1. Troubleshooting in Wired Networks. For references in that chapter, see previous 7.x chapters.

 

[osalbahr]

It doesn’t seem to show anything useful.

 

[osalbahr]

Update: It turned out to be an issue with the kernel and an Errata has been requested: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=288009