[OmniOS-discuss] Dell R720 & Broadcom ethernet

[Saso Kiselkov]

On 12/26/13, 8:10 PM, Saso Kiselkov wrote:
> On 12/26/13, 7:50 PM, Saso Kiselkov wrote:
>> On 12/26/13, 7:45 PM, Scott Roberts wrote:
>>> Saso,
>>>
>>> It has the following:
>>>
>>> Broadcom 57800 2x10Gb DA/SFP+ + 2x1Gb BT Network Daughter Card
>>>
>>> Broadcom 57810 Dual Port 10Gb Direct Attach/SFP+ Network Adapter
>>>
>>> Total of (2) GigE and (4) 10Gb SFP+ ports.
>>
>> Sorry to disappoint, but those 10Gb parts aren't and probably never will
>> be supported. Unfortunately, Broadcom has a bad habit of shipping binary
>> blobs only, so there's no way we could even port over support from other
>> platforms (as we're doing with Intel hardware).
> 
> Minor correction here. It appears the tg3 Linux driver *is* open-source,
> so provided that you can get Broadcom to give it a liberal-enough
> license to let us include it in Illumos, you might be able to port it to
> Illumos. FreeBSD, which is the source of many drivers that Illumos ports
> over, sadly, doesn't seem to support it either.

Damn, correction #2 here: FreeBSD does include support for this since
10-current, so its bxe(4) driver is a potential target for porting:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bxe&apropos=0&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+10-current&arch=default&format=html

Now just to find the person with enough spare time on their hands to do
the actual grunt work...

-- 
Saso