Yo, follow demonologist here. I’ve got the 11th gen framework laptop so we have different hardware which unfortunately means this isn’t a perfect test. Regardless, I attempted to recreate the issue and I couldn’t.
I used the latest disc1 iso of the amd64 FreeBSD 14.0 snapshots (FreeBSD-14.0-CURRENT-amd64-20230727-474708c334a7-264358-disc1.iso with sha512 of 752bc1d27130daa283321bdf2518cc4658ceb5c1ca49c7cac19b3324790efd17c9f381ad3915f457819452bfffdcddf5cbbc9f3a9c982e945a315da6c0e9f60e).
I then proceeded through the FreeBSD installer, installing on ZFS, and connecting to wifi (I use an AR9462 from ThinkPenguin so my wifi works out-of-the-box which lets me set it up through the installer).
Then I booted into FreeBSD and fetched google to show that wifi was working. Afterwards I shutdown, unplugged the wifi m.2 card, and rebooted and it still booted fine.
Here is a video of the process in case you can notice anything different that we did (I blur out anything that shows SSIDs since they can be used to get a pretty precise location): https://youtu.be/w4hq7wOkw4c
So reading your description, personally my first debugging step would be to try to figure out if this is a hardware or a software issue by doing the same things on Linux (as in, install a Linux distro and connect to wifi, then remove the wifi card and attempt to boot into it). If there’s something funky going on with the PCIe then hopefully that would also trigger issues.
Also I’d check to see if the FreeBSD 14 snapshot you are installing from is different from the one I am. Since FreeBSD 14 is a development release, those builds are just snapshots of whatever happens to be in git at the time, which means those builds are sometimes broken. I’ve had the FreeBSD snapshots from one week fail and the next week work fine.
Also idk how versed you are in FreeBSD but in case you don’t know: FreeBSD 14, despite the poorly named version of “-CURRENT”, is just the development version and it is not yet released. Unless you’re either a FreeBSD developer or the hardware in the 13th gen laptops requires FreeBSD 14, I would stick to the released version of FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE. You avoid a lot of breakage and you don’t have to deal with compiling your own build of FreeBSD to disable the debugging stuff that is enabled in -CURRENT that makes everything slow.
Is that possible? AFAIK the only only bootloader that boots FreeBSD is the FreeBSD bootloader. Regardless, OP says that putting his network card back in the laptop makes it boot again, so the bootloader would not have changed in between working and not-working states.
Booo! ZFS runs fine on low-ram systems. Definitely couldn’t hurt to try UFS as a debugging step but to deny our ZFS is to deny (one of) the very thing that makes us FreeBSD. (Yes I know Linux can use ZFS, I use both. No, ZFS on Linux is not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD.)