Hi Eric, Thank you. I’ve spent a few days researching this quite extensively. I’m aware of this. It seems that some mods have been incorporated into pf+ (closed source) probably in the ixgbe drivers to facilitate the MDIO bus and detection of the Marvell switch. However, like some other M270 owners, I don’t wish to invest in pf+ and would like to figure out just how much work is involved in modifying the drivers to work with the M270 unit under FreeBSD, or OPNsense.
Yesterday I stumbled upon Intel’s DPDK project. If you look at their mail archive you’ll find a number of mods to the X550 driver to address this issue. I’m currently looking at this for clues. https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@dpdk.org/msg88515.html Peter > On 15 Dec 2023, at 18:56, Eric Joyner <e...@freebsd.org> wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:51 AM Peter A Barlow <peterbarlow2...@gmail.com > <mailto:peterbarlow2...@gmail.com>> wrote: >> I’m looking at running FreeBSD on an old Firebox M270. >> It has a C3558 CPU with integrated X553 LAN controller which connects over >> MDIO to a Marvell 88E6190 switch. >> Out of the box the X553 backplane is detected but there doesn’t seem to be >> any attempt at probing the MDIO for connected devices. >> >> I’ve played around with the Intel ixgbe drivers, compiling the kernel etc to >> see if I can figure it out but I’m really struggling to understand what >> needs to be done. >> >> At this stage I’m reaching out to the community to see if anyone can clarify >> something for me….are there some fundamental changes or additions required >> to the drivers to make this work, or is it something that should work >> already but needs some options enabling or configurations tweaking. I’m >> reluctant to put more time into trawling through the code if it’s a ‘simple’ >> configuration issue. >> >> Any pointers would be very welcome. >> Thank you. > > I found this thread: > https://forum.netgate.com/topic/154974/pfsense-on-watchguard-m270/112 > > I think the TL;DR is that you need pfSense Plus since the required software > to get it to work isn't publicly available. > > - Eric
