xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/rtw88.4 (revision 4b15965daa99044daf184221b7c283bf7f2d7e66)
1.\"-
2.\" SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause
3.\"
4.\" Copyright (c) 2022-2025 Bjoern A. Zeeb
5.\"
6.Dd June 13, 2025
7.Dt RTW88 4
8.Os
9.Sh NAME
10.Nm rtw88
11.Nd Realtek IEEE 802.11n/ac wireless network driver
12.Sh SYNOPSIS
13The driver will auto-load without any user interaction using
14.Xr devmatch 8
15if enabled in
16.Xr rc.conf 5 .
17.Pp
18Only if auto-loading is explicitly disabled, place the following
19lines in
20.Xr rc.conf 5
21to manually load the driver as a module at boot time:
22.Bd -literal -offset indent
23kld_list="${kld_list} if_rtw88"
24.Ed
25.Pp
26It is not possible to load the driver from
27.Xr loader 8 .
28.Sh DESCRIPTION
29The
30.Nm
31driver is derived from Realtek's Linux rtw88 driver.
32.Pp
33This driver requires firmware to be loaded before it will work.
34The package
35.Pa wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod
36from the
37.Pa ports/net/wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod
38port needs to be installed before the driver is loaded.
39Otherwise no
40.Xr wlan 4
41interface can be created using
42.Xr ifconfig 8 .
43One can use
44.Xr fwget 8
45to install the correct firmware package.
46.Pp
47The driver uses the
48.\" No LinuxKPI man pages so no .Xr here.
49.Sy linuxkpi_wlan
50and
51.Sy linuxkpi
52compat framework to bridge between the Linux and
53native
54.Fx
55driver code as well as to the native
56.Xr net80211 4
57wireless stack.
58.Sh HARDWARE
59The
60.Nm
61driver supports PCIe devices with the following chipsets:
62.Pp
63.Bl -bullet -offset indent -compact
64.It
65Realtek 802.11n  wireless 8723de (RTL8723DE)
66.It
67Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8821ce (RTL8821CE)
68.It
69Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8822be (RTL8822BE)
70.It
71Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8822ce (RTL8822CE)
72.El
73.Sh LOADER TUNABLES
74.Bl -tag -width indent
75.It Va compat.linuxkpi.skb.mem_limit
76If you are running a 64bit system with more than 4GB of main memory
77you need to set this tunable to
78.Sy 1
79in
80.Xr loader.conf 5
81and reboot once to make it effective.
82This tunable will work around a problem with DMA and limit allocations
83for network buffer memory to the lower 32bit of physical memory and
84make the driver work.
85.El
86.Sh SEE ALSO
87.Xr rtw88fw 4 ,
88.Xr wlan 4 ,
89.Xr networking 7 ,
90.Xr fwget 8 ,
91.Xr ifconfig 8 ,
92.Xr wpa_supplicant 8
93.Sh HISTORY
94The
95.Nm
96driver first appeared in
97.Fx 13.2 .
98.Sh BUGS
99Certainly.
100.Pp
101Does not seem to work (reliably) on machines with more than 4GB of
102main memory.
103See in the
104.Sx LOADER TUNABLES
105section above.
106.Pp
107While
108.Nm
109supports 802.11a/b/g/n/ac modes,
110the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11a/b/g modes.
111Support for 802.11n/ac is yet to come.
112