On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, 10:52 AM Bjoern A. Zeeb <b...@freebsd.org> wrote:
> Hello, > > Cc: wireless, current, stable, desktop > > FreeBSD WiFi development has regained traction. We are facing a > decision with FreeBSD 15 coming before the end of this year [1]. > > In order to continue WiFi development, upcoming changes will inevitably > break the net80211-driver and net80211-userland interfaces. > By FreeBSD's standards those would not be mergeable to stable branches, > such as stable/15 then. > > This would imply development happening in FreeBSD 16-CURRENT (main at > that point) would stay there. The first release to ship anything major > beyond now would be FreeBSD 16.0 in December 2027 [1]. > > After some discussion we think this is not a feasible solution and we > will declare the KPI and KBI for wireless as unstable in FreeBSD 15. > > This allows us to merge changes from main into stable/15 for inclusion > in future point releases (e.g., 15.1, 15.2, etc.) as the code matures. > However, this also means that during the lifetime of FreeBSD 15, we may > introduce breaking changes affecting out-of-tree and in-tree drivers, > userland-kernel interfaces, and chipsets. We will address these > disruptions as they arise. > > Before finalizing this decision, we invite feedback from the community. > If you have concerns or objections, please speak up now. > I strongly support this. Ideally, we'd have good compat on 15.0 vs 15.4, but wireless is in such a state that I think the project is better served with the hassle of instability and better features faster than stability and stagnation with our currently incomplete feature set. Please work with the maintsiners of the point release pkg repo maintainers to help smoothe the experience for those ports that use the unstable ABIs. Warner Bjoern (on behalf of the Wireless Development Team) > Tom > Adrian > Ed > Joe > > [1] https://www.freebsd.org/releng/ > > -- > Bjoern A. Zeeb r15:7 > >
