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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the best way to get WiFi working in FreeBSD is to run Linux in bhyve and tunnel your connections through there.

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FreeBSD 15 has done a lot for WiFi apparently.

I'm not sure how good it is as I don't use wifi but it's supposed to be much better.

That kind of seems crazy to me, considering OpenBSD has worked perfectly fine with every wifi capable device I've tested it on. Granted, most of them were older machines.

Is this just an artifact of FreeBSD primarily focusing on server hardware rather than consumer/end-user stuff?

Basically no one supports Broadcom SoftMAC WiFi cards very well, but OpenBSD just doesn't. I have a 2015 MacBook Air with a BCM4350 where the recommended fix is to go buy a FullMAC card from a similar vintage MacBook Pro and just cope with the fact that the card barely fits in the case and can't be secured properly.

the fact that this is a widely accepted/encouraged practice is genuinely unhinged

Why? Nothing wrong with running your network interface in a VM. There are reasons for doing so even if drivers aren't an issue. Qubes OS does this, for instance, for security reasons.

Windows also does. Almost everything is a VM in windows these days.

It's just how things work these days. If you'd say "I run my VPN client in a docker container" it would raise a lot less eyebrows. Yet it's not very different, really.

Though conceptually I'd frown at having to run Linux. I'd prefer upgrading the hardware to a supported chip.

Windows isn't running entire fucking separate kernel to run wifi driver, the fuck you're talking about

Definitely not independent kernels but my guess is he's referring to Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) - it gets turned on by default if your Win10/11 system has virtualization enabled.

  One such example security solution is memory integrity, which protects and hardens Windows by running kernel mode code integrity within the isolated virtual environment of VBS. Kernel mode code integrity is the Windows process that checks all kernel mode drivers and binaries before they're started, and prevents unsigned or untrusted drivers or system files from being loaded into system memory.

I suppose this applies to Wi-Fi drivers?

Link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

no matter how it's implemented, it must not be a user-requiring (or even user-facing) task

Why not? FreeBSD has never been intended as a batteries included, everything "just works" out of the box OS. It's meant to have a bare minimum install and let the user choose how things are set up. You can disagree with that philosophy, but that's not an indictment of FreeBSD. Just go use something that aligns better with your preferences.

Not really weird when some firmware are close to being full blown OS. An alpine VM can be run with 64 MB which is lower than a lot of software.

I've used cellular modems which run Linux or ThreadX internally.

Weren't there iPhones that had wifi chips that ran Linux?

It seems the best way to get WiFi working is to run Linux and FreeBSD in a VM..

But then you’re stuck running Linux as your primary OS, which is a huge drawback.

FWIW, I’ve done both, FreeBSD with a virtualised OpenBSD for WiFi, and currently I run Arch so I can do gaming, with FreeBSD virtualised for development. I’m kind of looking to go back to my previous setup.

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