Question regarding Broadcom BCM5906M support under FreeBSD7

Gonzalo Nemmi gnemmi at gmail.com
Mon Apr 21 07:44:21 UTC 2008


While investigating about the Vostro 1400 .. I came across a lspci that claims 
that the Vostro 1400 comes packed with a Broadcom Corporation NetLink 
BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02) Ethernet controller ...

in case you want to check it out: 
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=558211

I moved quickly moved to 
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/hardware.html#ETHERNET in order to find 
out whether FreeBSD7 had support for BCM5906M chipsets but couldn't find it 
on the list of supported ethernet chipsets  
(http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/hardware.html#ETHERNET) so I assumed 
the answer was: no.

I moved to the OpenBSD page in order to see if they had a module for it and 
found out that they actually do for their next release (may 1 2008):

http://www.openbsd.org/43.html
- The bge(4) driver now supports BCM5906/BCM5906M 10/100 and BCM5755 
10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=bge&sektion=4

So i was wondering, is the Broadcom BCM5906M driver already available in 
FreeBSD 7 (but not documented), or is it on the way of getting imported from 
Open or anything, or does anybody have any info regarding support for 
Broadcom BCM5906M  based ethernet cards on FreeBSD7?

Last thing I knew about that was that there was a patch taken from DragonFly 
code (Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:19:23 GMT, Number: 118975, Severity:	
non-critical (????????),  State: open ) .. anyone knows anything else about 
that? It seems it's still not supported :(

Any info will be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advanced =)

Blessings

---
Gonzalo Nemmi



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