intel MDIO busses, marvell ethernet switches, ATT-V150 / M270 CPE boxes

hi!

A couple years ago I stumbled across threads where people wanted to
bring up FreeBSD on the AT&T ATT-V150 CPE and the Watchguard M270
firewall boxes but couldn't figure out why the ethernet switch wasn't
visible.

Well it wasn't visible because the intel driver didn't expose an MDIO
bus by default. Linux does, but a bunch of weird stuff is needed to
get it all to work together right.

Last year I put together a diff stack to fix the Marvell E6xxx switch
driver a bit and add MDIO support to the ix driver. It's all in -HEAD
now (as of like May 2026? or so), so if you want to play with the
etherswitch framework on an x86 box you can now (mostly) just get one
of the above boxes and whack -HEAD on it. There's hints to boot in
/boot/loader.conf but by and large it will just work after that.

I've written wiki pages about the devices which cover the weird
configs required to get serial consoles to work, configuring boot
devices and other bits and pieces needed (as well as the switch
configuration hints!) :

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/NetworkFirewalls/AttV150
* https://wiki.freebsd.org/NetworkFirewalls/WatchguardFireboxM270

Now before you ask, I don't yet have any plans to backport it to -15
as I'd like the MDIO changes to bake in -HEAD first and to find out
any weird side effects from having it available. But if you DID want
to play with it, please do consider grabbing -HEAD and messing around
with it a bunch. I have one of each in my little lab network here and
they're neat devices to explore the little switching framework we have
in FreeBSD.

Thanks!


-adrian