xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/rtw88.4 (revision a64729f5077d77e13b9497cb33ecb3c82e606ee8)
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25.Dd September 30, 2024
26.Dt RTW88 4
27.Os
28.Sh NAME
29.Nm rtw88
30.Nd Realtek IEEE 802.11n/ac wireless network driver
31.Sh SYNOPSIS
32The driver will auto-load without any user interaction using
33.Xr devmatch 8
34if enabled in
35.Xr rc.conf 5 .
36.Pp
37Only if auto-loading is explicitly disabled, place the following
38lines in
39.Xr rc.conf 5
40to manually load the driver as a module at boot time:
41.Bd -literal -offset indent
42kld_list="${kld_list} if_rtw88"
43.Ed
44.Pp
45It is discouraged to load the driver from
46.Xr loader 8 .
47.Sh DESCRIPTION
48The
49.Nm
50driver is derived from Realtek's Linux rtw88 driver.
51.Pp
52This driver requires firmware to be loaded before it will work.
53The package
54.Pa wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod
55from the
56.Pa ports/net/wifi-firmware-rtw88-kmod
57port needs to be installed before the driver is loaded.
58Otherwise no
59.Xr wlan 4
60interface can be created using
61.Xr ifconfig 8 .
62One can use
63.Xr fwget 8
64to install the correct firmware package.
65.Pp
66The driver uses the
67.\" No LinuxKPI man pages so no .Xr here.
68.Em linuxkpi_wlan
69and
70.Em linuxkpi
71compat framework to bridge between the Linux and
72native
73.Fx
74driver code as well as to the native
75.Xr net80211 4
76wireless stack.
77.Pp
78While
79.Nm
80supports all 802.11 a/b/g/n and ac
81the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11 a/b/g modes.
82Support for 802.11 n/ac is to come.
83.Sh LOADER TUNABLES
84.Bl -tag -width indent
85.It Va compat.linuxkpi.skb.mem_limit
86If you are running a 64bit system with more than 4GB of main memory
87you need to set this tunable to
88.Sy 1
89in
90.Xr loader.conf 5
91and reboot once to make it effective.
92This tunable will work around a problem with DMA and limit allocations
93for network buffer memory to the lower 32bit of physical memory and
94make the driver work.
95.El
96.Sh HARDWARE
97The
98.Nm
99driver supports PCIe devices with the following chipsets:
100.Pp
101.Bl -tag -width Ds -offset indent -compact
102.It Realtek 802.11n  wireless 8723de (RTL8723DE)
103.It Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8821ce (RTL8821CE)
104.It Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8822be (RTL8822BE)
105.It Realtek 802.11ac wireless 8822ce (RTL8822CE)
106.El
107.Sh BUGS
108Certainly.
109.Pp
110Does not seem to work (reliably) on machines with more than 4GB of
111main memory.
112See in the
113.Sx LOADER TUNABLES
114section above.
115.Sh SEE ALSO
116.Xr rtw88fw 4 ,
117.Xr wlan 4 ,
118.Xr fwget 8 ,
119.Xr ifconfig 8 ,
120.Xr wpa_supplicant 8
121.Sh HISTORY
122The
123.Nm
124driver first appeared in
125.Fx 13.2 .
126