xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/rtw88.4 (revision 7fdf597e96a02165cfe22ff357b857d5fa15ed8a)
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27.Dd November 10, 2024
28.Dt RTW88 4
29.Os
30.Sh NAME
31.Nm rtw88
32.Nd Realtek IEEE 802.11n/ac wireless network driver
33.Sh SYNOPSIS
34The driver will auto-load without any user interaction using
35.Xr devmatch 8
36if enabled in
37.Xr rc.conf 5 .
38.Pp
39Only if auto-loading is explicitly disabled, place the following
40lines in
41.Xr rc.conf 5
42to manually load the driver as a module at boot time:
43.Bd -literal -offset indent
44kld_list="${kld_list} if_rtw88"
45.Ed
46.Pp
47It is discouraged to load the driver from
48.Xr loader 8 .
49.Sh DESCRIPTION
50The
51.Nm
52driver is derived from Realtek's Linux rtw88 driver.
53.Pp
54This driver requires firmware to be loaded before it will work.
55The package
56.Pa wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod
57from the
58.Pa ports/net/wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod
59port needs to be installed before the driver is loaded.
60Otherwise no
61.Xr wlan 4
62interface can be created using
63.Xr ifconfig 8 .
64One can use
65.Xr fwget 8
66to install the correct firmware package.
67.Pp
68The driver uses the
69.\" No LinuxKPI man pages so no .Xr here.
70.Sy linuxkpi_wlan
71and
72.Sy linuxkpi
73compat framework to bridge between the Linux and
74native
75.Fx
76driver code as well as to the native
77.Xr net80211 4
78wireless stack.
79.Sh HARDWARE
80The
81.Nm
82driver supports PCIe devices with the following chipsets:
83.Pp
84.Bl -bullet -offset indent -compact
85.It
86Realtek 802.11n  wireless 8723de (RTL8723DE)
87.It
88Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8821ce (RTL8821CE)
89.It
90Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8822be (RTL8822BE)
91.It
92Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8822ce (RTL8822CE)
93.El
94.Sh LOADER TUNABLES
95.Bl -tag -width indent
96.It Va compat.linuxkpi.skb.mem_limit
97If you are running a 64bit system with more than 4GB of main memory
98you need to set this tunable to
99.Sy 1
100in
101.Xr loader.conf 5
102and reboot once to make it effective.
103This tunable will work around a problem with DMA and limit allocations
104for network buffer memory to the lower 32bit of physical memory and
105make the driver work.
106.El
107.Sh SEE ALSO
108.Xr rtw88fw 4 ,
109.Xr wlan 4 ,
110.Xr networking 7 ,
111.Xr fwget 8 ,
112.Xr ifconfig 8 ,
113.Xr wpa_supplicant 8
114.Sh HISTORY
115The
116.Nm
117driver first appeared in
118.Fx 13.2 .
119.Sh BUGS
120Certainly.
121.Pp
122Does not seem to work (reliably) on machines with more than 4GB of
123main memory.
124See in the
125.Sx LOADER TUNABLES
126section above.
127.Pp
128While
129.Nm
130supports 802.11a/b/g/n/ac modes,
131the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11a/b/g modes.
132Support for 802.11n/ac is yet to come.
133