# Atheros QCA6174 driver



## Eliphoria (Jan 1, 2019)

Hello FreeBSD forums! I'd love to make the switch to BSD as a current Linux user. However, my laptop is an Acer Aspire R5-571T-57Z0 and I can't seem to find the correct drivers. I know that in the installation of Debian, I had to grab extra firmware files. In looking around elsewhere, I found that I wouldn't be able to use the firmware files on BSD without having the drivers. When I boot into FreeBSD from USB to see if I can connect to wifi, the hardware isn't listed when using the "*sysctl net.wlan.devices*" command. I know that I probably should have done more searching before posting this question, but the answers I found weren't helpful. Please excuse my limited knowledge on the subject, everyone must start somewhere.


----------



## SirDice (Jan 2, 2019)

Boot FreeBSD again and post the output of `pciconf -lv`. So we can see what kind of hardware your machine has. The command will show everything, even the things that aren't detected by FreeBSD.


----------



## Eliphoria (Jan 2, 2019)

Device 1: Xeon E3-1200 v6/7th gen core processor host bridge/DRAM Registers
Device 2: HD Graphics 620
Device 3: Sunrise Point-LP USB 3.0 xHCI  Controller
Device 4: Sunrise Point-LP Thermal subsystem
Device 5&6: Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller
Device 7: Sunrise Point-LP CSME HECI
Device 8: Sunrise ... SATA Controller AHCI mode
Device 9: Sunrise ... PCI Express Root Port
Device 10: [???]
Device 11: Sunrise ... LPC Controller
Device 12: Sunrise ... PMC
Device 13: Sunrise ... HD Audio
Dev 14: Sunrise ... SMBus
Dev 15: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac


----------



## SirDice (Jan 2, 2019)

Erm, we would need everything. Especially the class, card and chip identification numbers.


----------



## aht0 (Jan 2, 2019)

Give this a try, and feedback is welcomed by developer. He posted request for testing in one of the FreeBSD's Facebook groups.


----------



## Eliphoria (Jan 2, 2019)

Thank you. It looks like I'll need to build the drivers first then FreeBSD from source. I have limited experience building from source, other than the Weston compositor and my own little C++ programs. My next hop might be a Linux From Scratch system before FreeBSD. Thanks for the information, I had been searching for that exact thing for days to no avail. I'm sorry to have you do my dirty work.


----------



## miklosq (Jan 31, 2019)

aht0 said:


> Give this a try, and feedback is welcomed by developer. He posted request for testing in one of the FreeBSD's Facebook groups.



Hello, it looks like you will need the FreeBSD-CURRENT development release and even then, it is not guaranteed to work . Do you know if installing the driver you referred to, will the wireless device work?


----------

