Re: Broadcom 3808 support

On Thu, Jan 06, 2022 at 11:29:04 +0100, Gerrit Kuehn wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I already asked this on -stable, but got no reply so far, so I'll try
> again here:
> I was thinking about buying something like Supermicro's
> SSG-540P-E1CTR45L storage box which comes with a Broadcom 3808 chipset.
> The Broadcom docs claim this has FreeBSD support, and so does this
> thread of a few months ago:
> https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-scsi/2021-June/000004.html
> 
> However, I cannot find the mentioned support in the mpr driver when
> looking into the code of FreeBSD 13, and I am missing any pointer from
> which FreeBSD version on support might be available. I also don't
> understand at all what is meant by "inbox driver" vs. "out-of-box
> driver" from the post linked above.

To put it in different words, what Sreekanth was trying to say in the
message linked above is that Broadcom commits their driver changes directly
to the FreeBSD source tree.  So, "inbox" means the driver is "in the OS
box", as it would have been back in the days when you bought an OS from a
store on CDROM.

They used to provide an "out of box" driver that you could download on
their web site, but they don't provide that anymore.  They'll just tell you
it works with FreeBSD as-is, so the downloadable driver isn't needed.

> Can anyone here shed a light on this for me? Is the Broadcom 3808 chip
> supported, and if so, from which version on?

The last time they added PCI IDs to the mpr(4) driver was in December 2018.
So, FreeBSD 12.3 or 13.0 should work with it, as would a number of earlier
releases.  If you want a precise answer, that will take more digging
through the tree to figure out.  You would need to look at
sys/dev/mpr/mpr_pci.c in the branch you're interested in.

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken@FreeBSD.ORG