Re: Support for Firebox M270 and the Intel X553 MDIO
- In reply to: Eric Joyner : "Re: Support for Firebox M270 and the Intel X553 MDIO"
- Go to: [ bottom of page ] [ top of archives ] [ this month ]
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2023 09:57:12 UTC
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 <erj@freebsd.org> wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:51 AM Peter A Barlow <peterbarlow2000@gmail.com <mailto:peterbarlow2000@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