Hello.
I observe a very negative and unpleasant development and behaviour with Intel
iwm driver
in FreeBSD recently. Using this WiFi adapter in a Lenovo E540 (technical specs
see below,
output of pciconf -lvbc), this adapter ran stable with FreeBSD 12-CURRENT some
time ago,
until I moved to 13-STABLE on that notebook.
I use a "typical" wlan0/re0/lagg0 configuration on that notebook, since I have
to switch
very often between WiFi and wired LAN. The FreeBSD 13-STABLE (most recent
incarnation) is
configured dual stack IPv4 and IPv6.
The overall observation is that the WiFi connection is, no matter what kind of
AP I used
to be connected to, that the connection is highly unstable! While ifconfig
still reports
attached IPs (both IPv4 and IPv6) on lagg0 and allegedly beeing associated via
wlan0 to
the AP, there is no connection any more and the only salvation is service netif
restart
or bringin down and up IF and all associated services. This problem gets worse,
the more
the WiFi is crowded with other stations, but even in sparsely populated WiFi
areas the
loose of connection/association is only a matter of time, sometimes the death
of the
connection comes rather quickly.
I can only report my observations. I used to use the very same notebook with
FreeBSD
CURRENT and lately with 13-STABLE with FreeBSD since I purchased it in 2014 and
used the
same wlan0/re0/lagg0 configuration I use these days, but with I never faced an
instability like the reported with 12-STABLE I face with 13-STABLE. The problem
is
present almost 1 1/2 years for now and even with newer commits to WiFi in
FreeBSD I did
not see a mitigation.
I also realized that iwm() is limited by its FreeBSD driver to 802.11b and
802.11g,
although it claims to be an 802.11ac driver. Is this about to change in a
measurable
timeframe for a human lifetime?
Thanks a lot,
oh
[...]
iwm0@pci0:5:0:0: class=0x028000 rev=0x73 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x8086
device=0x08b2
subvendor=0x8086 subdevice=0x4262 vendor = 'Intel Corporation'
device = 'Wireless 7260'
class = network
bar [10] = type Memory, range 64, base 0xf1c00000, size 8192, enabled
cap 01[c8] = powerspec 3 supports D0 D3 current D0
cap 05[d0] = MSI supports 1 message, 64 bit enabled with 1 message
cap 10[40] = PCI-Express 2 endpoint max data 128(128) FLR RO NS
max read 128
link x1(x1) speed 2.5(2.5) ASPM L1(L0s/L1) ClockPM enabled
ecap 0001[100] = AER 1 0 fatal 0 non-fatal 0 corrected
ecap 0003[140] = Serial 1 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
ecap 0018[14c] = LTR 1
ecap 000b[154] = Vendor [1] ID cafe Rev 1 Length 20
