It seems like the best way to get WiFi working in FreeBSD is to run Linux in bhyve and tunnel your connections through there.

I agree that 9/10 is a bit of a strange score there, but it's not all that bad: You can get a $15 wifi dongle and use that instead. It occupies a USB port and looks a bit ugly, but it's still a fairly easy workaround.

Is there a cheap, common USB wifi dongle that works?

In the old days I kept a couple Realtek USB adapters around that would almost always work out of the box or with ndiswrapper

FreeBSD WiFi is certainly fun.

Some years ago, I was workig with FreeBSD on an old laptop. The laptop had a wireless adapter that ostensible should be supported, but was not.

After some digging, I realized the driver was just missing some PCIe device identifiers. I added them to driver and bam my WiFi is working without issue.

I tried to submit a bug report and patch, and it got positive feedback at first any changes even got committed. But then I learned why it’s better to not even try.

Apparently this was a known issue, but only in the heads of the FreeBSD wireless developers. They had their reasons for not adding the device, but the reasons did not appear to be documented in mailing lists or docs until my thread. At that point I realized it’s not worth it to try and contribute to such large projects as I just lack the decades of institutional knowledge of the system.

Anyway, I’m not sure it ever got released. I believe there’s an umbrella bug somewhere left after the version my patch supported went out of support.

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