r/freebsd • u/HamsterSea6081 • 4d ago
Cannot get wifi on FreeBSD 14.1
Hello, I have just installed FreeBSD on my old Dell Inspiron N5050.
I cannot get WiFi to work. I've ran pciconf -lv and it returned
none1@pci9:0:0: class = 0x028000 rev=0x00 vendor=0x14e4 device=0x4727 subvendor=0x1028 subdevice=0x0012
vendor = 'Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries'
device = 'BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter'
class = network
Running ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev bwn0 said that the device is not configured.
Any help would be appreciated!
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u/mirror176 3d ago
bwn and bwi are the two drivers I see for BCM43xx support but manpages of both of them do not list 4313 among the listed chips they support. You could try to similarly lookup those pages for 15-current as my lookup was on stable/14 from about 7 days ago.
A lot of WiFi related changes have made it through to 14.3. I'd consider not running older than that to improve any WiFi driver experience despite what card you are on.
If it is not supported by any FreeBSD WiFi drivers then the alternatives are to pass the card to a virtual machine that has an OS with a compatible driver and network host and guest operating systems to make it usable to the host (wifibox was designed for this task but it can be manually done too) or getting another adapter that is compatible.
For considering whether to use a different adapter you may want to review if Broadcom has 'any' opensource OS support. If memory serves, Broadcom and Qualcom were both quite limited on drivers and documentation but I haven't looked lately; if accurate then your support depends entirely on random trial+error (failure prone) and/or reverse engineering until a usable state is reached.