[Bug 291133] [iwx] driver panic when loading firmware

From: <bugzilla-noreply_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:53:18 UTC
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=291133

Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |bz@FreeBSD.org

--- Comment #8 from Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org> ---
Given the sys/conf/files commit referenced PR 290812 the problem seemed correct
here. 


Maybe there was a reason the driver was only built as module?

It's not needed to boot to multi-user.
devd does the job properly to auto-load it (ignoring the overlap with iwlwifi
for which the simple rc.conf line sample vanished from the man page) to make it
just work for a user without any need to do anything more if the installer had
installed firmware.

firmware can only be loaded once multi-user is available (otherwise you have to
do loader.conf hacks like were done for iwm that we don't want to add more of,
really don't).

None of the modern wireless drivers do have kernel config file entries
anymore... iwlwifi doesn't, rtw88 doesn't, rtw89 doesn't... and until we
support net booting over wifi there is no need for that (*) (**).

Maybe the error simply was the copy and paste from the openbsd man page and
should have been left at that.

I had a reply to the original commit along these lines but didn't send it as I
didn't have the time to check if the driver actually did any magic to detect
anything beyond "when interrupts are available" to delay firmware loading. 
Seems I should have.

If we want to document how to add a (wireless|non-essential to boot) device
driver to the kernel and how to load firmware from loader, we should really
just do that in a single man page and stop replicating the same "template" all
over man pages.

We are not in the 1990s anymore.  Change is hard.  I went through this enough
times initially with iwlwifi when people tried to do what we taught them (and
apparently still trying to) rather then following 2020s instructions.


(*) There are two exceptions: monolithic kernels and people adjusting secure
level.  But I'd argue that those people know what they are doing as they also
would not have graphics which also only gets loaded from kld_list or otherwise
during multi-user.

(**) I am still tempted to remove all from GENERIC which have proper
MODULE_PNP_INFO.

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