Reply to post: Re: "Yes, FreeBSD doesn't have Wifi"

Re: "Yes, FreeBSD doesn't have Wifi"

Indeed. FreeBSD has had wifi for years.

In fact, wasn't it ahead of linux in the early days because if a freebsd driver didn't exist you could just use the windows driver via the ndis driver..

From: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/config-network-setup.html :

"Unfortunately, there are still many vendors that do not provide schematics for their drivers to the open source community because they regard such information as trade secrets. Consequently, the developers of FreeBSD and other operating systems are left with two choices: develop the drivers by a long and pain-staking process of reverse engineering or using the existing driver binaries available for Microsoft® Windows® platforms.

FreeBSD provides “native” support for the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS). It includes ndisgen(8) which can be used to convert a Windows® XP driver into a format that can be used on FreeBSD. Because the ndis(4) driver uses a Windows® XP binary, it only runs on i386™ and amd64 systems. PCI, CardBus, PCMCIA, and USB devices are supported."