NICs not in GENERIC

Navdeep Parhar np at FreeBSD.org
Wed Feb 22 01:55:40 UTC 2012


On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 05:44:01PM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> 
> On Feb 21, 2012, at 10:51 AM, Navdeep Parhar wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 03:56:56PM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> is there a specific reason that the following NICs are not (or shall  
> >> not be) in GENERIC (at least on i386)?
> > 
> > No specific reason for these two:
> > 
> >> - if_cxgb
> >> - if_cxgbe
> > 
> > But I do prefer to load them as modules (and as late as possible --
> > after sysctl.conf has been processed and any nmbclusters, nmbjumboXX
> > settings have taken affect).
> > 
> > Other than root over NFS, is there any reason to have NIC drivers in
> > GENERIC?
> > 
> 
> GENERIC is the kernel profile that's used during installation, and the
> installer (at one point in time) supported installing over NFS and FTP.

If the installer itself can come up without the NIC driver it should be
able to load any NIC driver KLD it wants and then reach the "install
media" (NFS, FTP, etc.) over the network.  Or is it that the installer's
root fs didn't have any KLDs back then?

Navdeep

> GENERIC was also a good smoke test to see if FreeBSD would run on a newly
> purchased machine, since it included most drivers.
> 
> Scott
> 
> 


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