Re: Broadcom 3808 support

On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 15:31:51 -0500
"Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote:

Hello Ken,

> 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.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation. I found downloadable drivers and
firmware quite handy in the past as a fall-back option in case the one
bundled with the OS didn't work properly (had to do that once or twice,
but that was something like 10y+ ago).

> 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.

That's already everything I wanted to know, actually. Thank you very
much again.
I had looked into the source tree of the mpr driver in 13.0, but
somehow failed to find references to the 3808 chipset (just had looked
for "3808" as a string, which isn't there, in contrast to 3816 - but
maybe that was a too shallow idea on my side :-). The 38* chipsets also
aren't mentioned in the mpr manpage at all - maybe that one isn't
up-to-date then (although it claims to be from June 1, 2019 here)?


cu
  Gerrit

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