Re: Support for Firebox M270 and the Intel X553 MDIO

Hello Peter,

Sorry to dig up the old thread, not sure about the mailing list 
rules/etiquette on old threads.

I'm looking to get a silicom i3000 up and running with FreeBSD 
(Opnsense). It has similar specs to the M270 with two X553 cpu ports and 
a Marvell 88E6190X switch. I found this thread and tried the patches in 
that you've linked to and also added the patch for the 
ixgbe_[write|read]_phy_reg_mdi_22, however I'm still not getting a 
/dev/mdio device. Did you make any progress on this one? Do you have any 
suggestions?

At-least one user was able to get pf+ on it and /dev/mdio did appear.

Thanks,

Jason Hensler

On 12/16/23 4:57 AM, Peter A Barlow wrote:
> 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.
> [dpdk-dev] [PATCH v3 2/2] net/ixgbe : backplane port MDIO support 
> <https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@dpdk.org/msg88515.html>
> mail-archive.com <https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@dpdk.org/msg88515.html>
> 	apple-touch-icon-114x114.png 
> <https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@dpdk.org/msg88515.html>
>
> <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> 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
>