The latest release of the project Wifibox 0.17 is now available, with the aim of addressing the issue of FreeBSD lacking drivers for certain wireless adapters. Wifibox solves this problem by running a guest system with Linux, allowing native Linux drivers for wireless devices to be utilized. This environment has been tested on WiFi cards from Intel, AMD/MediaTek, Realtek, Qualcomm, and Broadcom.
Installation of the guest system with drivers is automated through the packaged wifibox package, which includes all necessary components. The guest system runs on the Bhyve hypervisor, enabling access to the wireless card. Hardware virtualization support (AMD-Vi or Intel VT-d) is required. The guest system is based on Alpine Linux with the Musl system library and BusyBox utilities.
For wireless network connectivity, the wpa_supplicant package is used, with configuration files synchronized with FreeBSD settings. The Unix control socket for wpa_supplicant is forwarded to the host environment, allowing the use of standard FreeBSD utilities like wpa_cli and wpa_gui.
In the latest release, the project has ceased using grub-bhyve for booting and now only supports guest systems with UEFI. Additionally, network bridges are no longer used, with the tap network interface directly interfacing with FreeBSD 15. Support for the FreeBSD 13 branch has been discontinued, and the control process terminates when the guest system is shut down.