Intel iwn5100: does it needs firmware to work?

[larzeni]

Dear All,
I'm a linux seasoned veteran, but a opnsense/bsd newbie, so I beg your pardon for my question.

I'd like to install opnsense (OPNsense-19.1-OpenSSL-vga-amd64.img.bz2) on an ARMORTEC J1900 Bay Trail mini PC (3 LAN, 1 WIFI).

After many attempts, I was unable to install opnsense directly on this machine, so I placed a hard disk on another pc, installed there, and then restored the hard disk in the mini pc. Hooray, now it boots

... well, at boot the system hanged on the infamous "Booting" prompt, but I managed to overcome the issue using the "kern.vty=sc" parameter.

So far, so good: the system show all network interfaces, and I could connect and manage it using LAN/Web interface.

At this point, I would like to set up the wifi, but evenif the iwn interface shows in the GUI, I was not able to make it work.

My guess is that, since I installed the system on another PC, maybe the installer did not setup the firmware for the wifi card; or, it could not be provided by opnsense for the intel license issues.

Anyway, I googled around and found that the firwmare are readily available in BSD, the can be downloaded from

http://firmware.openbsd.org/firmware/6.4/iwn-firmware-5.11p1.tgz

and that I should use fw_update to download and install in the mini PC.

Now the problems:

1) I didn't find the fw_update command in opnsense.
2) I tried pkg search fw_update, but I was not able to find in the repository so I cannot install this command
3) I downloaded the firmware package and tried to install with pgk add, but it complains that there is no manifest.
4) I understand that the "reccommended" setup of opnsense is to avoid internal wifi, but since it is already there and that it is supported from bsd, I guess it should work...

So, my questions are:

a) Did I broke the wifi autodetection with my installation procedure?
b) Do I need this firmware to make the wifi work, or not?
c) Should I install fw_update and, if yes, where can I find it?
d) should I install the firmware manually? How can I do this? Where should firmware files be placed? I spotted /boot/firmware and /usr/share/firmware... should I use one of them or another location?

Your faithfully ,
lazeni