Re: iwlwifi: i7260 does not load firmware properly/wifi not working

On Mon, 21 Mar 2022 18:33:55 +0000 (UTC)
"Bjoern A. Zeeb" <bzeeb-lists@lists.zabbadoz.net> wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Mar 2022, Stefan Blachmann wrote:
> 
> > @"FreeBSDUser" maybe try with the iwm driver instead of the iwlwifi one?
> 
> I understood that iwm with lagg wasn't working well either for
> "FreeBSD User" or did I misread this?
> 
> 
> > It works fine for me. The only thing is the firmware loading thing:
> > it does not work for me when I set in /boot/loader.conf
> >    iwmfw_load="YES"
> > which for some reason causes error messages about firmware not found.
> > However, explicitly specifying
> >    iwmXXXXfw_load="YES"
> > works just fine.
> >
> > @Björn, is this normal (mistake on my side), or could it be considered a bug?
> 
> "iwmfw" is a catch-all to compile all iwm firmare into the kernel.
> 
> As both man iwm and man iwmfw state (ot my memory) you have to load the
> individual firmware from loader directly if they are not compiled into the
> kernel (either indidivdually or by catch-all);  there is no catch-all module.
> We could add that but that would just load a lot of blobs into memory we
> don't need.
> 
> In general I'd suggest to not load any WiFi drivers from loader
> anymore these days (that's a relict of old times).  At least move to
> kld_list=".." in rc.conf if the drivers do not properly support
> auto-loading yet.  It's way faster to load the driver that way rather
> than from loader.
> 
> I would hope that in the longer-term we get away from loading
> non-essential drivers from loader (or compiling them into GENERIC) given we
> have way better facilities these days (faster and more flexible).  One of
> the reasons iwlwifi cannot even be compiled into the kernel anymore;  just
> don't want to start it at all anymore unless someone knows a good reason it
> is needed in the kernel before we go multi-user (*).
> 
> /bz
> 
> (*) One is securelevels but that hasn't come up yet...
> 
> -- 
> Bjoern A. Zeeb                                                     r15:7

 There is a lot of reasons for having drivers compiled into the kernel
or loaded by loader(8), for me one is to have a small mfsroot (either
embedded or not) without any kernel modules.
 I'd argue that if a driver can't be loaded via loader or compiled into
the kernel it's a bug that we have to fix (and yes I know this is the
case for DRM).

-- 
Emmanuel Vadot <manu@bidouilliste.com> <manu@freebsd.org>