FreeBSD 14.3 with major advances in the WiFi stack

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The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has published the point release FreeBSD 14.3. Two problems have been addressed: The WiFi stack, which has been somewhat neglected up to now, has caused some notebook users to suffer from lukewarm data transfer rates and gray hair. There were also problems with the black text mode screen after installing the previous version FreeBSD 14.2. FreeBSD 14.3 solves both of these problems and gives a good foretaste of future developments.

New network drivers in FreeBSD 14.3

The WiFi drivers for the popular Realtek RTW88 and RTW89 chips now correspond to those of Linux kernel 6.14. In this context, the LinuxKPI code has also been improved and finally supports 802.11n and 802.11ac in addition to crypto offloading (hardware encryption). A side effect of all the new features is that some drivers have problems with the outdated TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol, also known as WPA).

Many other drivers for network hardware have been added or improved. The Intel IX Ethernet driver, for example, now also recognizes x550 1000BAS-BX SFP modules. The bnxt(4) driver for Broadcom's NetXtreme-C/NetXtreme-E family now supports the 5760X PCI IDs (Thor2), NPAR on BCM57504 10/25GbE NICs and also the 400 Gbps modes.

The long road to better WiFi support

All BSDs, i.e. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Dragonfly BSD, which is geared more towards computing clusters than notebooks, lag behind Windows and GNU/Linux in terms of WiFi hardware support. This was originally different, because in the early 2000s the development team around Sam Leffler built an 802.11 kernel stack (net80211) for FreeBSD, which was technologically ahead at the time and implemented less common modes such as Access Point Mode or Monitor Mode. In addition to drivers for Intel chips, there were also early implementations for the chip jungle of Atheros and Ralink.

Around 2010, Adrian Chadd took over the task and focused on data throughput and stability, especially for the Atheros chipsets. His team implemented multiple virtual interfaces and improved debugging functions. Over the years, more and more developers turned to other tasks and WiFi on FreeBSD became the area that caused administrators and users to gnash their teeth, to say the least.

Backed by new funding, the FreeBSD WiFi project has picked up speed for some time now. The team around Björn Zeeb and Tom Jones modernized the WiFi stack and – perhaps more importantly – ported various WiFi drivers from OpenBSD and Linux. Compared to FreeBSD 13.x, WiFi connections can now be up to ten times faster under FreeBSD 14.3 – and this is clearly noticeable.

A "half update" to 14.3

If you want (or have to) wait for the complete update from 14.2 to 14.3, you can quickly build a 14.3 kernel including WiFi improvements under 14.2:

fwget
git clone https://git.freebsd.org/src.git /usr/src
cd /usr/src
git switch stable/14
make -j $(nproc) buildkernel
make installkernel

The first command updates the firmware, the "git switch" ensures that the FreeBSD 14.3 kernel is built instead of the FreeBSD 15 kernel.

DRM update stumbling block solved

With FreeBSD 14.2, a black text mode screen was sometimes displayed after installation because the DRM driver build process for the 14.2 release took place on the previous 14.1 release. The only remedy was to rebuild the slightly newer drm-kmod under the then current FreeBSD 14.2:

pkg remove drm-kmod
git clone https://git.FreeBSD.org/ports.git /usr/ports
cd /usr/ports/graphics/drm-kmod
make install

With FreeBSD 14.3, the developers have added a new package repository for kernel modules. In the future, kernel modules such as drm-kmod will be compiled cleanly from the respective release. It is clear that the developers are already focusing on the upcoming FreeBSD 15, which is scheduled for the beginning of December. Many new features of FreeBSD 15 have been and will be "backported" to FreeBSD 14.3.

Further detailed improvements

FreeBSD 14.3 comes with OpenSSH 9.9p2 and OpenSSH 3.0.16. xz(1), which has recently been plagued by security issues, has also been updated to version 5.8.1. Since the switch from "native" ZFS to OpenZFS, its development has progressed rapidly. FreeBSD delivers OpenZFS 2.2.7, which, however, no longer starts when installed on a system with MBR (Master Boot Record instead of UEFI) – So be careful when upgrading such systems!

Since UEFI also does not want to work with the classic console (syscons), syscons(4) has been marked as "depreciated" for future removal from FreeBSD. ARM64 users can look forward to support for PCIe hotplugging.

The developers describe all the new features in the release notes. FreeBSD 14.3, which is released under the free BSD license, is now available free of charge via the project page for the hardware platforms amd64, i386, aarch64, armv7, powerpc, powerpc64, and riscv64.

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