Updates - Impact on /boot directory / drivers? Do I need to do some sort of factory reset first?

[Rhydgaled]

Last year @DaddyGo and @stephenw10 helped me to get my office's firewall up and running with the bnxt driver, which was not part of the pfSense kernel at the time.

However, I am now being presured by management to update pfSense (we are currently on 2.4.5-RELEASE) and I'm concerned about breaking something. My first concern was that I am not sure whether the update will reset the changes I made to get it to load the drivers, and that I might have to do it again.

However, the system dashboard is offering an update to version 2.5.2. The release notes for version 2.5.0 include the following change "Added bnxt driver for Broadcom NetXtreme interfaces #9155". This therefore raises another concern, will the driver now being in the kernel conflict with the modifications I made before? Will it try to load the driver twice, and do I need to somehow undo the manual driver loading (reseting pfSense to its factory configuration) before running the update?

[Gertjan]

Updating to 2.5.2 will also update the FreeBSD kernel to a later version.
2.5.2 uses "FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE".

Drivers are compiled for specific kernel version. The one you have right now will not be accepted, loaded or used by 12.2 - the internal driver will get used if needed.

Did you edit files ? You could probably - after the upgrade - undo what you've edit / added in the past.

[jimp]

Do you have an identical system you can test on in a lab style setup? If not, you should, for exactly this reason. Plus if your management has that kind of concern, HA is a must.

If the driver for that is now in pfSense, odds are you won't need your custom module any longer.

Most likely you copied over a .ko file and edited /boot/loader.conf.local or /boot/loader.conf.

Edit those files again, remove any reference to bnxt, then upgrade.

[stephenw10]

There's no real danger here because the old kernel module from 2.4.5 won't load in 2.5.2 anyway.
If you do nothing it will just use the in kernel driver in 2.5.2 and log a harmless error at boot.
You should just remove the loader values anyway to make it cleaner.

But, as JimP said, really you should test it first. I expect it to work in 2.5.2 since it did in 2.4.5 but there is no guaranty of that. There were significant changes to most network drivers in FreeBSD, and hence pfSense, between 11 and 12.

Steve