Intel atom INTEL BLKD425KT - cant detect builtin LAN

wallabybob

Can't detect the onboard NIC? What brand and model?

If you can boot to shell prompt and can capture the output of the shell command

dmesg; pciconf -l -v

and post it here it will help understand what is going on.

If you try booting a 2.0 snapshot you might get away with configuring no WAN and LAN as a NIC in an expansion slot. Then you could point a browser to the pfSense system, type the commands into the command box on the page Diagnostics -> Command Prompt and capture the output in the browser.

BLKD425KT is the Intel model number of the motherboard?

stephenw10

Looks like the 8105E is a bit quirky and has only been supported by FreeBSD since March this year:
http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=219112
May not be in pfSense yet.

Steve

Edit: Here's Intels guide that I took the specs from: PDF

jduval

@stephenw10
yes, thats the one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121445

@wally
how do i boot a 2.0 snapshot?
is it different from what i downloaded?

these are what i have
pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-LiveCD-Installer.iso
pfSense-2.0-RC3-i386-20110621-1650.iso

if i have to download, so be it
i need this bo be fixed the soonest possible time :)

thanks you much for the reply :)

stephenw10

The first thing to try is the latest snapshot, usually from today. Download it from here:
http://snapshots.pfsense.org/

However I think that 2.0 went into code freeze before this card was supported. (I could be wrong!)

You might have to try something even newer like 2.1 development or copy across a newer driver from FreeBSD.

Steve

jduval

@stephenw10:

The first thing to try is the latest snapshot, usually from today. Download it from here:
http://snapshots.pfsense.org/

However I think that 2.0 went into code freeze before this card was supported. (I could be wrong!)

You might have to try something even newer like 2.1 development or copy across a newer driver from FreeBSD.

Steve

will this do it?
pfSense-2.0-RC3-i386-20110727-1927.iso.gz

You might have to try something even newer like 2.1 development or copy across a newer driver from FreeBSD

how can i do this?

stephenw10

@jduval:

will this do it?
pfSense-2.0-RC3-i386-20110727-1927.iso.gz

That's the newest 2.0 snapshot yes, try that first.

@jduval:

how can I do this?

Not that easily and anything newer than 2.0RC3 is far more likely to have bugs. You would be running bleeding edge code with all that pit falls that entails. ;)

Having just looked into it further I'm not even sure it's possible.

Steve

jduval

tried the latest snap shot, still no good :(

is it possible to add driver support for it?

i have 3units of it and really want to make them all work

my supplier ran out of BLKD945GCLF2 which i had no problem at all

wallabybob

@jduval:

is it possible to add driver support for it?

I've done a fair bit of backporting FreeBSD driver patches to older versions. If you are prepared to provide a financial incentive send me a PM to negotiate. Adding the patch for device recognition looks to be fairly straightforward but there isn't any easy way to tell if that will be sufficient. To get your NIC to work MIGHT involve backporting a number of other patches as well.

You will probably have less trouble if you use a motherboard you already know works unless you are likely to have to purchase a number of this particular model.

stephenw10

@wallabybob:

I've done a fair bit of backporting FreeBSD driver patches to older versions.

I just spent most of yesterday trying to compile a newer version of the msk driver and failed miserably! :(
I was using this post as a guide.

Steve

jduval

problem solved

my supplier replaced the board with asrock n68 ucc + sempron 140
my pfsense box is running perfectly now

thanks so much for the help guys :)

wallabybob

@stephenw10:

I just spent most of yesterday trying to compile a newer version of the msk driver and failed miserably! :(

Since the original issue seems to have gone away it should be OK to hijack this thread.

One approach would be to to install a FreeBSD 8.1 system with sources, download the new msk driver and replace the 8.1 driver and build the msk module.

However, some of the changes might make use of new code in the 8.2 kernel that isn't in the 8.1 kernel, or some of the kernel interfaces may have changed (e.g. different number of parameters or different parameter types) between 8.1 and 8.2. In that case, if you just want to include a particular patch (rather than all the changes from 8.1 to 8.x) its possible to use the web interface to the source repository to get diffs between particular revisions. I looked at the svn web interface yesterday and found it much less useful for this sort of exercise than the cvs web interface but that may be because I've not used the svn web interface before and I'm used to the cvs web interface. It might be that the particular patch you want to include depends on other patches to the 8.1 driver and then things can get a bit complicated.

I don't have details of how your build attempt failed and its a couple of years since I last did this so I'm a bit rusty on the details so I'm not going to attempt to be more specific.

stephenw10

Thanks for the advice.
That is effectively what I did. As I said I used this post as a guide simply because it reported some success.
I have an 8.1_rel system that I was using for compiling other code. I checked out the source from /stable/8.
Then I followed the instructions in that post. However there seemed to be at least one typo: a missing /dev/
and I was unsure about:

edit Makefile to add 'miidevs.h rdcphy.c' to the list of files to build

Do those need to be built or added as sources? I didn't build them so that could explain the compile errors which were mii related I seem to recall.
I don't have access to the machine just now but I could post everything if you're up for it. ;)

Steve

wallabybob

@stephenw10:

and I was unsure about:

edit Makefile to add 'miidevs.h rdcphy.c' to the list of files to build

Do those need to be built or added as sources? I didn't build them so that could explain the compile errors which were mii related I seem to recall.
I don't have access to the machine just now but I could post everything if you're up for it. ;)

They were probably files for that particular driver discussed in the linked page. (That is, I'm not sure if we are discussing a possible patch for the msk driver, adding vte driver for RDC R6040 ethernet controller to FreeBSD sources as discussed in the linked article or using the linked article as a 'template' for building an updated msk driver module.)

If you don't post anything I won't be up for it! I'll take a look at whatever you post but I probably won't be able to spend a lot of time on it and its a while since I've done this sort of thing.

stephenw10

I'm trying to build a newer version of the msk driver as it was recently (22 Jun) patched to fix a long standing stability issue that caused it to 'lock up' when it's receive buffer was filled under some circumstances, on some hardware. That hardware happens to be what is used in the Watchguard Firebox X-E series appliances. I currently work around the problem by running the interface at 100Mb but that is not an option for many users.
I was using the linked post as a template as you say. Since it was an example building a NIC driver for FreeBSD 8.1 from newer sources I thought it had a fair chance of success.

I already started a thread about this here. Perhaps it would be better to continue that.

Steve