System booted just fine, but doesn’t recognize the wifi. Complains no wifi enabled in /etc/rc.conf.
Note: beautiful launch to full screen res gui using the Mac IMG. Flashing was done on a different device, as my internal has issues, but the firmware does find the network.
Hi there @Aramis_Erak,
welcome to the forum!
FreeBSD’s support for wifi chips used in Macs is very limited. Could you provide the output of the command pciconf -lv | grep -B3 network, please?
Hi @mk1, thank you for your help,
I am not the original poster, however I have been having the same issue on a macbook pro mid 2015. the output of the command is
none3@pci0:3:0:0: class=0x028000 card=0x0152106b chip=0x43ba14e4 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Broadcom Inc. and subsidaries'
device = 'BCM43602 802.11ac Wireless LAN SoC'
class = network
That is unfortunate, I don’t suppose there is any way I could go about writing (or modifying) a driver to support it because it is Apple and proprietary (not to mention my inexperience)?
If you don’t do the homework before installing a open source OS the end result wont be good. There is a list of HW support for a reason. BCM adapters are known to not work in FreeBSD, first thing I always say to people when using a “BSD” is it requires a lot of “This doesn’t work, live with it” you could fiddle with the bwn driver and add PCIIDS (if you know what that is, if not then ask). Or you can do what I do and just buy a backup adapter with a known OSS happy chip such as intel or Atheros. A decent one is https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FVTGIPQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 FreeBSD doesn’t support AC so don’t bother to waste money on something it wont use. Honestly not really sure why you would install FreeBSD on a mac when Mac OS is the OS of choice but I wont get into that here. If you still want to write a driver for it then you can read the src for bwn https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/dev/bwn/ I personally stopped doing OSS work but still up to you if you want to fiddle with the code, FreeBSD is a complete system so the src is for the full OS not just the kernel.
You have two options:
You could always buy a new mPCI wifi card but chances of it being blacklisted is almost 100%, even with a new card it will not run fast as it’s limited to G as FreeBSD doesn’t have a newer stack. This is fine if you don’t care for speed but knowing that you can’t watch movies in HDR kind of sucks. I purchased a Mac Mini from 2019 and I have no intention at all to run any non Mac OS operating system on it, once it reaches it’s EOL it will be used as a Apple recycle towards another Mac Mini or what I chose. Not to mention opening a Mac Air is a royal pain and having to stick a USB dongle kind of sucks as well. Apple doesn’t own Broadcom, however Broadcom is crap in regards to supplying the documentation needed to create drivers, and the company like most will only support the most commonly used OS Windows, Mac, and the Penguin and I would rather use Windows than the Penguin so …
As maintainer of one of the famous Linux distributions in the past I’ve replaced WiFi modules (with testing purposes) in hundreds of laptops and never encountered such a problem. I heard about it, but did not meet. Can you give an example?