Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2019 08:20:54 +0000 From: "Thomas Mueller" <mueller6722@twc.com> To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Working around unsupported Ethernet card with PXE or UEFI? References: <20190621023301.CRCA7107.dnvrco-fep06.email.rr.com@dnvrco-cmimta20> <39143.1561086356@segfault.tristatelogic.com> <CACpH0Mekh-Mxb6Ns1y_sb-8pLeE%2BeYGTDtMceKQY3cXstCgE%2BA@mail.gmail.com>
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from Ronald F. Guilmette:
> "Thomas Mueller" <mueller6722@twc.com> wrote:
> >Is it possible to build and install FreeBSD so as to be bootable and access
> >the internet with an Ethernet card that doesn't work in FreeBSD?
> You're question doesn't make a lot of sense on the face of it.
> Why on earth would you either WANT or NEED to install FreeBSD on a system
> with no ethernet adapter?
> If it's a matter of money, I have at least a half dozen old 10/100 cards
> lying around collecting dust. If you send me your address and if it is
> in North America, I'll send you one via snail-mail. Or you can probably
> get one faster off eBay for about a buck and a half.
You should have read more carefully, system has an ethernet adapter that worked on some past installations of FreeBSD, and works on NetBSD, System Rescue CD (Linux) and Haiku R1Alpha4 from November 2012.
I use subversion built on NetBSD from pkgsrc to update FreeBSD src, ports and doc trees. Using GPT, UFS and no traditional BSD disklabels, FreeBSD and NetBSD can read and write to each other's partitions.
I managed to boot FreeBSD 12-stable on this computer in UEFI mode and apparently get internet access with "dhclient re0".
Then "host news.individual.net" worked correctly.
Running
ifconfig re0 up
ifconfig re0 inet 192.168.0.2/24
route add default 192.168.0.1
seemed to connect, but then "host news.individual.net" failed (strange).
Now to try on FreeBSD-current with UEFI, using dhclient?
from Zaphod Beeblebrox:
> I suppose he could be asking, in his way, about a type of universal driver
> (not unlike ndis used to be). Not knowing anything about the UEFI
> environment, but recalling that PXE requires one of the more restrictive
> processor modes ... would make that quite a challenge for a universal
> driver.
> ... but yeah... USB ports are pretty ubiquitous.
PXE boot could be done in BIOS mode as well as UEFI mode, but if selected from boot menu, would figure to be in UEFI mode. Hopefully I would be using the motherboard's support for the onboard ethernet rather than FreeBSD's support. But I am not sure if it would work like that.
Tom
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