# iwm in FreeBSD 13 Hardware Notes



## PsilentPsmith (Apr 15, 2021)

I was going through the FreeBSD 13 Hardware Notes and couldn't find any mention of the wireless network adapters supported by iwm driver. 

Is this a mistake or is there any reason behind it e.g too unstable yet to use etc. ?


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## SirDice (Apr 15, 2021)

The iwn(4) man page is often not updated to include every possible card combination either. As with most drivers it's not specific cards that are supported but a specific chip or chipset. The easiest way to test is to boot the install media, drop to a shell instead of install and look if your specific device is detected or not.

The iwn(4) driver has been included since FreeBSD 8 I think. Release notes often only mention _new_ drivers or important changes to _existing_ drivers.


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## PsilentPsmith (Apr 15, 2021)

SirDice said:


> The iwn(4) man page is often not updated to include every possible card combination either. As with most drivers it's not specific cards that are supported but a specific chip or chipset. The easiest way to test is to boot the install media, drop to a shell instead of install and look if your specific device is detected or not.
> 
> The iwn(4) driver has been included since FreeBSD 8 I think. Release notes often only mention _new_ drivers or important changes to _existing_ drivers.


Thank you for the immediate reply!

What I wanted to say was this:
In 11.4 Release Hardware Notes, this is mentioned: 

[i386, amd64] Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 3160/7260/7265 IEEE 802.11ac network adapters (iwm(4) driver)

In 12.2 and 13 Release Hardware Notes, there is no mention of iwm driver. Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 3160/7260/7265 IEEE 802.11ac network adapters are instead shown as supported by iwn driver:

[i386, amd64] Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 3160/7260/7265 IEEE 802.11ac network adapters (iwn(4) driver)

Which I release now must be a typo unless support of the mentioned network adapters has been transferred to the iwn driver?


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## SirDice (Apr 15, 2021)

What's tricky here is the order in which releases are done. So it's possible for 11.4 to support something that 12.1 doesn't. That's counter intuitive but is easily explained due to the order in which the releases are made. There are typically always 2 major branches in play. Releases are made every six months (that's the plan at least). Recently a new major version was released, 13.0. In about six months you can expect a 12.3 release. Then 6 months later, 13.1. Then 12.4, 13.2, etc. I'm not including 11 releases here because the entire 11 branch will be EoL next September, so no more releases there, 11.4 was the last one. 

In your case I would definitely try 13.0 because that was just released and therefor should have the best chance of supporting your hardware.


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## bakul (Apr 15, 2021)

PsilentPsmith said:


> Which I release now must be a typo unless support of the mentioned network adapters has been transferred to the iwn driver?


Yes, it seems like a typo as “ls /boot/kernel/iw[mn]?*fw.ko“ will show if you’re running 13.0


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## SirDice (Apr 15, 2021)

Oh, right, there's an iwn(4) and an iwm(4), they're two different drivers. Got trapped by dyslexia I see.

iwm(4) got added with 11.0-RELEASE. Not as long ago as iwn(4) but still has been around for a while. Both drivers have new variants included regularly, not all of them are mentioned in the man pages or release notes.


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