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Only if auto-loading is explicitly disabled, place the following lines in rc.conf(5) to manually load the driver as a module at boot time:
kld_list="${kld_list} if_iwlwifi"
The driver should automatically load any iwlwififw(4) firmware needed for the particular chipset. See section FILES below for how to install the firmware.
It is discouraged to load the driver from loader(8).
iwlwifi is derived from Intel's Linux iwlwifi driver. The iwm(4) and iwx(4) drivers together are approximately equivalent to Intel's Linux iwlwifi/mvm driver.
In addition iwlwifi already supports Intel's Linux iwlwifi/mld chipsets.
iwlwifi still complements the iwn(4) driver which supports older chipsets and would be equivalent to Intel's Linux iwlwifi/dvm, which iwlwifi does not support.
The driver uses the linuxkpi_wlan and linuxkpi compat framework to bridge between the Linux and native FreeBSD driver code as well as to the native net80211(4) wireless stack.
The iwlwifi driver supports PCIe devices from the mld sub-driver with the following chipset generations:
These chipset generations match the following common device names:
| compat.linuxkpi.iwlwifi_11n_disable | |
| Turn off 802.11n support in the driver. Default ‘1’. | |
| compat.linuxkpi.iwlwifi_disable_11ac | |
| Turn off 802.11ac support in the driver. Default ‘1’. | |
The names of the tunables are derived from the Linux iwlwifi driver module parameters and are mapped automatically by linuxkpi. They were not adjusted so that they stay consistent with upstream Linux, e.g., for documentation available and problem investigations. This left their names inconsistent between themselves and incosistent to FreeBSD style.
The tunables are automatically adjusted by the firmware package for chipsets which can enable 11n and 11ac. In case of problems a user may want to override the provided values in /boot/loader.conf.local with the above defaults.
While iwlwifi supports 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be modes, the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11a/b/g/n/ac modes. 802.11n/ac is only available on the 22000 and later chipset generations. 802.11ax/be and 6Ghz support are planned.
| IWLWIFI (4) | May 12, 2025 |
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