LAN Driver, Qualcomm Atheros AR8171
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Hi,
I didn't put a great processor in it - just a Pentium G3220. Was trying to build a fairly inexpensive box. But even that is a 3 GHz processor, so you may very well be right.
I did notice that the driver is logging a lot to syslog. I can remove this, and try again … make sense? But ... I don't have a box on the WAN side anymore that runs iperf ... I can install it on the pfSense box, and have it terminate there, but - will it make a difference if I use the WAN or LAN IP address?
Thanks!
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FYI, recompiled, reinstalled the driver (and rebooted) … and retested. I'm now getting ~ 930 Mb/s, so life is good ... :). I'll be honest though, not sure how to tell if I'm going through the WAN port or not. I am targeting the WAN IP address (from the LAN side), but not sure if it really gets there ... :(.
Thanks.
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Hi arrmo.
Congrat's on getting this working!
I also have this board and would love to run with the single onboard nic (using VLANs).
Can you please post the driver and some instructions (or links) to get this working?
Thanks a heap!
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Absolutely! More than happy to help out if I can. Is there a place to post the file? I can't attach it here (not of the allowed file types).
Thanks.
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Just re-name the file, add .png to the end. Don't use the .txt extension as that confuses some browsers and corrupts the file.
That driver appears to still be in active development, the last commit was only 19days ago, so check back if you find any bugs.
Edit: Nothing major changed since Dec last year though.Steve
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Excellent!
wikisend.com looks good for small files - no reg. needed.
or as Steve suggested, rar it, then rename to .png and add it to a post here.
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Hi,
You bet - attached here … just remove the .png from the end (real name is if_alx.ko).
Yes, it's active. I actually spoke to the author before building my driver, asked him to remove some of the console diagnostics (which he very graciously did - very helpful guy!). Let me know if you have any issues with this driver.
Thanks.
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Thanks.
Do you have a linky or pointers on how to install/use the driver?
I am new to freebsd o/s….guess i can google but all help appreciated.
Thanks.
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ok, found some instructions…but get this error... :-\
[2.1.4-RELEASE][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(1): kldload /boot/kernel/if_alx.ko kldload: can't load /boot/kernel/if_alx.ko: Exec format error [2.1.4-RELEASE][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(3): uname -a FreeBSD pfSense.localdomain 8.3-RELEASE-p16 FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p16 #0: Fri Jun 20 13:19:29 EDT 2014 root@pf2_1_1_amd64.pfsense.org:/usr/obj.amd64/usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_SMP.8 amd64 [2.1.4-RELEASE][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(4):and this in dmesg
KLD if_alx.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch linker_load_file: Unsupported file type -
Because:
@arrmo:This is on pfSense 2.2, compiled on FreeBSD 10.
You can't use this module on 2.1.X because that's built on FreeBSD 8.3 as you've seen. Also it has to be the correct architecture, 32 or 64bit. I'm not sure what the module is.
Steve
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Bugger, missed that very important piece if information.
Ok, soooo, what's involved in compiling on 8.3? Can I do this from pfsense (without downloading bucketloads of extra bloat) or do I need to have a freebsd install to compile?
Perhaps I should just cop the extra watts from my pcie Intel nic and run with that…
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No, there are no build tools in pfSense and trying to add them will be a disaster. Use FreeBSD 8.3 to build things for pfSense. I have used a bsd live cd to compile simple things before.
I imagine you would have difficulty compiling this kernel module against 8.3 though, a lot has changed between that and 10. Probably easier to take the power hit. ;)Steve
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Hi,
Steve has it right - and this is basically what I did (created a VM in VirtualBox, built it there).
FYI, as I missed this above (sorry!), this is an x64 driver.
Thanks.
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Thanks guys.
Might park this one for the moment as time is precious for me at the moment and go with the Intel PCIe nic card for now.
Perhaps we'll see it come standard in a later pfsense release ;)
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Hi arrmo,
I dad some issues with my PCI wifi card so I decided to take the plunge and move to 2.2 ALPHA.
The driver installed without issues (just temporarily loaded it using kldload).
I can not create a VLAN on the alx0 interface.
Can you pls. check to see if you can create VLANs on your interface?
EDIT: looking at the nic with ifconfig, it's not supported…ie does not show VLAN_HWTAGGING
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You don't need to have hardware tagging on the NIC to use VLANs it just offloads some work from the driver/CPU. In fact in some cases VLANs work better with it disabled. For example: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/2577
The driver has to know how to handle VLANs though, perhaps this doesn't yet. It's a development driver.
Edit: A quick glance through the code seems to show plenty of VLAN references.Steve
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Hi Stephen.
Thanks for the reply (and for trawling the code).
Unfortunately the interface still does not show as a valid interface when defining VLAN's (em0 does, but not the alx).
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hi there I got the asrock h81m-itx
thx for the driver arrmo
anyone know how to inject the driver into pfsense for install? never compile anything. anyone can point me into the right direction. plan to add a intel nic to the pci-e of the board and that will give me to two nic as I need :D
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Easiest way to get this installed would be to add the Intel NIC first and use that as the only assigned interface. Then add the new driver and the Atheros NIC will be seen. You can always change the NIC assignment afterwards if you prefer. Alternatively you can probably put the driver on a USB stick, mount the stick and copy it across manually.
Steve
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Hi,
It seems that alx is now officially supported in FreeBSD (see https://github.com/markjdb/alx-freebsd/commit/74500d38295e6a9c6e476ecab7be7a052b9620da).
But this doesn't seem to be in the latest v2.2-RC … is there a reason why not?
Thanks!
