Running FreeBSD on Firebox III

[Sakai, Kazuhiro]

Hello.

I am currently struggling with running the FreeBSD 4.11 based  
firewall, m0n0wall, on a WatchGuard Firebox III 1000. There are two  
difficulties:

1. Ether Station Address

The Firebox III is equipped with 3 Macronix 98715AEC chips, but  
m0n0wall fails to get their station addresses (got all 0xff).  
Although this issue has been resolved by patching to the dc driver.  
According to the Application Notes of Macronix 98713, the beginning  
address (offset) of station address in EEPROM is stored in 0x70,  
however, for Firebox III the station address is only stored in 0x20  
as other Tulip ether cards store their station address there, and  
0x70 is bogus. Never minds ;-)

2. IDE Controller

The second issue is the IDE controller. Firebox III has a 7MB onboard  
flash memory (Samsung K6F6408U0C, the same chip used in RIO), which  
can be accessed through the primary channel. There is also a 44 IDE  
pin, which is also primary, and you can connect any device as a  
slave. Interestingly, you can switch the master and slave by a jumper  
pin besides the IDE pin.

First thing I tried is; connect a 2.5 HDD, which I installed  
m0n0wall, switch the master/slave by jumping, and power it up. Kernel  
loaded. But it sometimes froze when m0n0wall tries to remount the disk.

To investigate further, I installed FreeBSD 4.11 to the 2.5 HDD using  
another PC, and boot it on Firebox. It boots up fine. I patched the  
dc driver, setup the network, did cvsup, built world, and built  
kernel, like a charm.

However, if I try to mount the onboard 7MB flash memory, FreeBSD  
totally froze. Even fdisk -v can sometimes freeze it.

Then I installed Gentoo Linux on another 2.5 HDD and boot it on  
Firebox. Surprisingly, Linux can fdisk, mkfs, fsck and mount/umount  
the onboard flash memory.

Okay, here's my question. Where should I start? I looked the ata  
driver but found no clue. What's the big difference between the Linux  
ata driver and the FreeBSD's?

Thanks in advance.

Sakai, Kazuhiro
kazuhiro at robios.org