FreeBSD developers have been working a lot on their wireless/WiFi driver support in recent months as part of their broader initiative for [1]improving their operating system support for laptops . While a lot of progress has been made on seeing more modern WiFi support and recent WiFi chipsets being enabled, it's still not complete and that puts FreeBSD 15 in a tough position. FreeBSD 15 is set to be released later this year and will likely declare their wireless support as "unstable" to allow time for making future breaking modifications.

With FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE due out later in 2025 but the WiFi driver initiatives not yet being all wrapped up, it puts them in a difficult position whether to declare their recent wireless driver work as "stable" or not. If going stable per FreeBSD ABI stability policies they wouldn't be able to cause breaking changes with user-space later on. Thus they are looking at going the "unstable" route for FreeBSD 15 to allow for breaking changes to be introduced as needed for FreeBSD 15.x point releases around their wireless support.

Their focus is on the FreeBSD KPI compatibility layer for in this case using it to help in leveraging Linux wireless drivers and the kernel binary interface (KBI) around the wireless drivers.

Bjoern Zeeb explained the situation yesterday on the [2]FreeBSD mailing list :

"FreeBSD WiFi development has regained traction. We are facing a decision with FreeBSD 15 coming before the end of this year.

In order to continue WiFi development, upcoming changes will inevitably break the net80211-driver and net80211-userland interfaces. By FreeBSD's standards those would not be mergeable to stable branches, such as stable/15 then.

This would imply development happening in FreeBSD 16-CURRENT (main at that point) would stay there. The first release to ship anything major beyond now would be FreeBSD 16.0 in December 2027.

After some discussion we think this is not a feasible solution and we will declare the KPI and KBI for wireless as unstable in FreeBSD 15.

This allows us to merge changes from main into stable/15 for inclusion in future point releases (e.g., 15.1, 15.2, etc.) as the code matures. However, this also means that during the lifetime of FreeBSD 15, we may introduce breaking changes affecting out-of-tree and in-tree drivers, userland-kernel interfaces, and chipsets. We will address these disruptions as they arise.

Before finalizing this decision, we invite feedback from the community. If you have concerns or objections, please speak up now."

At least this will allow for better and more active wireless driver improvements to be made for FreeBSD rather than waiting until FreeBSD 16 in another two years for end-users wanting to enjoy FreeBSD on laptops and other systems with WiFi.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Laptops-Feb-2025

[2] https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-current/2025-June/007800.html