Working around unsupported Ethernet card with PXE or UEFI?

[Dave Cottlehuber]

On Tue, 25 Jun 2019, at 01:05, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> > Hi Tom
> > https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config-network-setup.html
> 
> > NDIS may do what you want but it may suck.
> 
> > In terms of time vs effort a 15$ USB Ethernet dongle is going to be your best result. If this is a server consider getting a 2nd hand intel NIC. I can get a 4 port pci intel Gb for under 100$ years which is more than sufficient.
> > Lower spec cards will be even cheaper.
> 
> > There are references on the forums and mailing lists with ones that work for both USB and iNICs.
> 
> > Dave
> 
> NDIS is not dependable in my experience, and I have had instances of 
> the kernel failing to compile with NDIS.

Not surprised to hear that.

> How dependable are USB Ethernet dongles to work with FreeBSD? 

I got this one which I use for my laptop when normal FreeBSD wifi isn't sufficient "works for me":

EU4306: https://www.edimax.com/edimax/merchandise/merchandise_detail/data/edimax/global/network_adapters_usb_adapters/eu-4306/
axge(4): https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=axge

It's sufficient for doing make install over NFS and sending/receiving full zpool dumps, I can't speak for performance nor cpu usage but then you get what you pay for :-). I'm reasonably sure that you can't expect server-level performance out of this, and an intel PCI nic(like i350 or i210) is surely a better bet.

A+
Dave