[OmniOS-discuss] Dell R720 & Broadcom ethernet

[Saso Kiselkov]

On 12/26/13, 8:44 PM, Lauri Tirkkonen wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 26 2013 20:12:18 +0000, Saso Kiselkov wrote:
>> 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...
> 
> Interestingly, Broadcom's GLDv3 driver package for these cards from
> http://www.broadcom.com/support/license.php?file=NXII_10/solaris_ev-7.8.11.zip
> includes the source code and even has an illumos compilation target (but
> no illumos binaries). We tried at work and the driver attaches to our
> 57810 NICs, but we haven't tried actually using them yet. The license
> doesn't seem very permissive though...
> 

Neat. If anybody knows the relevant people at Broadcom, it would be
interesting to ask them if they'd be interested for this work to be
folded into the Illumos mainline code. My guess is the answer will be
"no", but would be interesting to ask nonetheless.

Cheers,
-- 
Saso