The Wifibox 0.17 project release is now available, aimed at solving the issue of using wireless adapters in FreeBSD for which the necessary drivers are missing. The problematic FreeBSD adapters operate in Wifibox through booting a guest system with Linux, which loads the native Linux drivers for the wireless devices. This environment can potentially be applied to any WiFi cards supported in Linux and has been tested on Intel, AMD/MediaTek, Realtek, Qualcomm, and Broadcom chipsets.
The setup of the guest system with drivers is automated, and all necessary components are packaged into a ready-to-use wifibox package that launches at boot using the included rc service. The guest system is run with the Bhyve hypervisor, which facilitates access to the wireless card. A system with hardware virtualization support (AMD-Vi or Intel VT-d) is required. The guest system is based on the Alpine Linux distribution, built on the Musl standard library and the BusyBox utility set.
To connect to the wireless network, the wpa_supplicant package is used, with configuration files synchronized with settings from the primary FreeBSD environment. The created Unix socket for wpa_supplicant is forwarded to the host environment, allowing the use of standard FreeBSD utilities for connecting and working with the wireless network, such as wpa_cli and wpa_gui (net/wpa_supplicant_gui).
In the new release, the use of grub-bhyve for booting has been discontinued, retaining only the ability to start guest systems with UEFI support. Network bridges are no longer in use (for correct operation in FreeBSD 15, the tap network interface is now used directly without wrapping through the bridge interface). Support for the FreeBSD 13 branch has been terminated. The management process is ensured to terminate in case the guest system execution is completed.
Source: opennet.ru
