xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/rtw89.4 (revision 3750ccefb8629a08890bfbae894dd6bc6a7483b4)
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25.\" $FreeBSD$
26.\"
27.Dd October 12, 2024
28.Dt RTW89 4
29.Os
30.Sh NAME
31.Nm rtw89
32.Nd Realtek IEEE 802.11ax 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_rtw89"
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 rtw89 driver.
53.Pp
54This driver requires firmware to be loaded before it will work.
55The package
56.Pa wifi-firmware-rtw89-kmod
57from the
58.Pa ports/net/wifi-firmware-rtw89-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 should 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.Em linuxkpi_wlan
71and
72.Em 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.Pp
80While
81.Nm
82supports all 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and ax
83the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11 a/b/g modes.
84Support for 802.11 n/ac is to come.
85.Sh LOADER TUNABLES
86.Bl -tag -width indent
87.It Va compat.linuxkpi.skb.mem_limit
88If you are running a 64bit system with more than 4GB of main memory
89you need to set this tunable to
90.Sy 1
91in
92.Xr loader.conf 5
93and reboot once to make it effective.
94This tunable will work around a problem with DMA and limit allocations
95for network buffer memory to the lower 32bit of physical memory and
96make the driver work.
97.El
98.Sh HARDWARE
99The
100.Nm
101driver supports PCIe devices with the following chipsets:
102.Pp
103.Bl -tag -width Ds -offset indent -compact
104.It Realtek 8851BE Wi-Fi 6  (RTL8851BE)
105.It Realtek 8852AE Wi-Fi 6  (RTL8852AE)
106.It Realtek 8852BE Wi-Fi 6  (RTL8852BE)
107.It Realtek 8852CE Wi-Fi 6E (RTL8852CE)
108.It Realtek 8922AE Wi-Fi 7  (RTL8922AE)
109.El
110.Sh BUGS
111Certainly.
112.Pp
113Does not seem to work (reliably) on machines with more than 4GB of
114main memory.
115See in the
116.Sx LOADER TUNABLES
117section above.
118.Sh SEE ALSO
119.Xr wlan 4 ,
120.Xr fwget 8 ,
121.Xr ifconfig 8 ,
122.Xr wpa_supplicant 8
123.Sh HISTORY
124The
125.Nm
126driver first appeared in
127.Fx 14.2 .
128