Re: Broadcom 3808 support

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 22:22:30 +0100, Gerrit Kuehn wrote:
> 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)?

Yes, it looks like Steve McConnell (who used to be the Broadcom maintainer,
but moved to their firmware group) was the last one to update the list of
supported devices in 2017.

So the man page is indeed out of date.

The mpr(4) driver supports all of their 12Gb SAS (non-RAID) chips as far
as I know.

I think the last two digits of their SAS chip and board model names are
the number of SAS lanes.

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken@FreeBSD.ORG