Re: WiFi 802.11/ac PCIe supported adaptor

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 11:20 PM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn_at_freebsd.org>
wrote:

>
> On 09/27/14 23:06, O. Hartmann wrote:
>
>> Am Sun, 28 Sep 2014 00:22:09 +0200
>> Lars Engels <lars.engels_at_0x20.net> schrieb:
>>
>>  On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 02:38:30PM +0200, O. Hartmann wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm looking for a replacemnt for my 802.11g WiFi PCIe adaptor card and
>>>> want to
>>>> replace it with an 802.11ac adaptor.
>>>>
>>>> Since I made very bad experiences with CURRENT and support of modest
>>>> modern hardware
>>>> (Haswell CPU/Intel  7260 DualBand WiFi NIC), I'd like to ask here first.
>>>>
>>>> I found this PCIe adaptor card attractive:
>>>>
>>>> GigaByte Gigabyte GC-WB867D-I
>>>>
>>>> I can not find ad hoc the WLAN chip used on that specific card, but
>>>> maybe someone has
>>>> experiences with that litte board.
>>>>
>>> FreeBSD doensn't support 802.11ac, yet.
>>>
>> I'm bitter aware of that. This OS doesn't support the chipsets, even if
>> they provide also
>> 11a/g/n.
>>
>> We have at our department now a bunch of Lenovo hardware, with Intels
>> 7260 chipset. The
>> laptops are now runninmg Ubuntu 14.0X something which obviously supports
>> the WiFi chip.
>> I'm the last man standing with FreeBSD on my private Lenovo :-(
>>
>
> This is a serious problem. I'm about ready to install Linux on my laptop
> as well just to get a usable system. Some kind of funding directed to a
> willing developer would be hugely valuable for the usability of the
> operating system on recent hardware. This is probably more important even
> than Haswell graphics since without a driver, Haswell is merely slow,
> whereas networking is completely broken.
> -Nathan


While I don't yet have need of it and probably won't any time soon,
Haswell support is becoming critical. It is getting more and more difficult
to get boards with pre-Haswell processors, especially for laptops. It is
still pretty easy to get supported WiFi cards for both desktops and
laptops. I feel Haswell is getting to be a critical issue.

VESA is available for Haswell systems, but it is very slow and too often
the BIOS support of VESA is poor. Vendors want text mode for boot and such,
but really have little interest in graphics as Intel has good native
Windows drivers for them.Still waiting for Lenovo to fix VESA for my old
Sandy Bridge laptop. I used VESA, which was badly broken, for almost a year
waiting for KMS support, though I did get a recent BIOS update and have not
tried VESA on it.
--
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman_at_gmail.com