On Fri, 13 Mar 2015 15:48:02 +0000 Miguel Barbosa Gonçalves <m...@mbg.pt> wrote:
> I recently installed OpenBSD 5.6 on an amd64 platform. Everything went > smoothly. After installation, at the first boot, OpenBSD updated the > firmware of some devices. I found this strange... OpenBSD runs fw_update(8) on first boot. fw_update simply downloads firmware packages and installs firmware onto the filesystem (not directly into the devices that use it) for drivers that need to load it at runtime. Linux has a similar firmware-loading mechanism, but it typically ships the firmware embedded in the kernel. > I had to reinstall this machine with CentOS and now the NIC does not > work. Did the machine work with CentOS previously? It seems extremely unlikely that fw_update would be able to break Linux's use of the hardware, since that firmware is loaded on every boot by the relevant driver in both operating systems. > I reinstalled OpenBSD again and it works. I tried to reflash the NIC's > firmware and the installer does not recognize the NIC. At the moment, > the machine only works with OpenBSD... Some details as to specifically what you did and what failed, as well as a dmesg, would be useful here. All I can say with the information given is that, if your Broadcom NIC requires non-free firmware to be loaded by the driver, the OpenBSD installer would not be able to use it because it does not include non-free firmware. If fw_update was able to run on first boot, though, it sounds like your NIC is usable without firmware. Again, a dmesg would help (I'm not even sure which of the three Broadcom NIC drivers in OpenBSD you're using).
