Sanity check my xircom fix ….

apfusertoo

Some background: after FreeBSD 6.x, certain changes made xircom PCMCIA cards (among others) no longer functional in FreeBSD (and in turn, pfsense).

Will this workaround / patch:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=2198

work properly on pfsense 2.x ? Basically I need to patch some files in /usr/src/sys/dev/cardbus and rebuild the kernel … is that a reasonable thing to be doing with pfsense ?

If there's a better way to do this, I am all ears...

wallabybob

Do you know the patch is still needed? (pfSense 2.0 snapshot builds are currently based on FreeBSD 8.1)

apfusertoo

Yes, it is still needed. Plain old FreeBSD 8.x still shows shows:

cardbus0: Unable to allocate resource to read CIS.
cardbus0: Unable to allocate resources for CIS

and pfsense 2.x crashes immediately upon insertion.

apfusertoo

Is it possible to get some "yay" or "nay" on the above process working ?

I do this kind of thing all the time on plain old FreeBSD systems - I just want to make sure that the patching and recompiling operation that I have detailed above is a reasonable thing to be doing on a pfsense system.

For instance, I don't even see the /usr/src directory when I log into the shell …

Thanks!

cmb

There is no source or compilers or anything else you need on the installs, you'll have to add your patch to the patch list and run the full build process. Or if you can just build it as a kernel module and copy it over that's definitely easier but not sure if that'll work for that specific scenario.

apfusertoo

Hmmm…

What if, during custom install, I choose the "developer" distro ? Will that give me /usr/src and compilers and so on ?

jimp

No, that just gives you a debug kernel.

There is no option to get a compiler and other related tools (make, etc) on the firewall.

apfusertoo

@cmb:

There is no source or compilers or anything else you need on the installs, you'll have to add your patch to the patch list and run the full build process. Or if you can just build it as a kernel module and copy it over that's definitely easier but not sure if that'll work for that specific scenario.

Is there a wiki / HOWTO page on "the full build process" ?

I'm curious - does it bother anyone else that a fair number of PCMCIA cards just rotted out of FreeBSD ? Support for xircom pcmcia cards was not dropped, and 'xe' is still part of FreeBSD … and yet, it has been broken since 6.x at least.

The same is true, apparently, of several other pcmcia adaptors.

Why was this allowed to happen ?

jimp

To make a builder system:
http://devwiki.pfsense.org/DevelopersBootStrapAndDevIso

As for why PCMCIA faded away, no idea. Probably because the hardware has somewhat faded away. Laptop hardware has a pretty short life no matter what OS it's running. Keeping that hardware around to make sure it works with the latest networking code can't be easy/cheap/fun for the FreeBSD developers. That's a question better asked on a FreeBSD mailing list/forum though.