Question regarding Broadcom BCM5906M support under FreeBSD7

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Monday, April 21, 2008 4:44 AM -0300 Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> 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
>

Looking at the header file in HEAD, the highest number card supported is 
the 5787.  It doesn't look like there's support for that card yet.

<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/bge/if_bgereg.h?rev=1.73.2.1;content-type=text%2Fplain>

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/