Re: Support for Firebox M270 and the Intel X553 MDIO

[Jason Hensler]

Hello Peter,

Sorry to dig up the old thread, not sure about the mailing list 
rules/etiquette on old threads.


I'm looking to get a silicom i3000 up and running with FreeBSD 
(Opnsense). It has similar specs to the M270 with two X553 cpu ports and 
a Marvell 88E6190X switch. I found this thread and tried the patches in 
that you've linked to and also added the patch for the 
ixgbe_[write|read]_phy_reg_mdi_22, however I'm still not getting a 
/dev/mdio device. Did you make any progress on this one? Do you have any 
suggestions?


At-least one user was able to get pf+ on it and /dev/mdio did appear.

Thanks,

Jason Hensler

On 12/16/23 4:57 AM, Peter A Barlow wrote:

Hi Eric,

Thank you. I’ve spent a few days researching this quite extensively. 
I’m aware of this. It seems that some mods have been incorporated into 
pf+ (closed source) probably in the ixgbe drivers to facilitate the 
MDIO bus and detection of the Marvell switch. However, like some other 
M270 owners, I don’t wish to invest in pf+ and would like to figure 
out just how much work is involved in modifying the drivers to work 
with the M270 unit under FreeBSD, or OPNsense.


Yesterday I stumbled upon Intel’s DPDK project. If you look at their 
mail archive you’ll find a number of mods to the X550 driver to 
address this issue. I’m currently looking at this for clues.
[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v3 2/2] net/ixgbe : backplane port MDIO support 


mail-archive.com 
	apple-touch-icon-114x114.png 





Peter



On 15 Dec 2023, at 18:56, Eric Joyner  wrote:

On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:51 AM Peter A Barlow 
 wrote:


I’m looking at running FreeBSD on an old Firebox M270.
It has a C3558 CPU with integrated X553 LAN controller which
connects over MDIO to a Marvell 88E6190 switch.
Out of the box the X553 backplane is detected but there doesn’t
seem to be any attempt at probing the MDIO for connected devices.

I’ve played around with the Intel ixgbe drivers, compiling the
kernel etc to see if I can figure it out but I’m really
struggling to understand what needs to be done.

At this stage I’m reaching out to the community to see if anyone
can clarify something for me….are there some fundamental changes
or additions required to the drivers to make this work, or is it
something that should work already but needs some options
enabling or configurations tweaking. I’m reluctant to put more
time into trawling through the code if it’s a ‘simple’
configuration issue.

Any pointers would be very welcome.
Thank you.


I found this thread: 
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/154974/pfsense-on-watchguard-m270/112


I think the TL;DR is that you need pfSense Plus since the required 
software to get it to work isn't publicly available.


- Eric

Re: Support for Firebox M270 and the Intel X553 MDIO

[Peter A Barlow]

Hi Eric,

Thank you. I’ve spent a few days researching this quite extensively. I’m aware 
of this. It seems that some mods have been incorporated into pf+ (closed 
source) probably in the ixgbe drivers to facilitate the MDIO bus and detection 
of the Marvell switch. However, like some other M270 owners, I don’t wish to 
invest in pf+ and would like to figure out just how much work is involved in 
modifying the drivers to work with the M270 unit under FreeBSD, or OPNsense.

Yesterday I stumbled upon Intel’s DPDK project. If you look at their mail 
archive you’ll find a number of mods to the X550 driver to address this issue. 
I’m currently looking at this for clues.
https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@dpdk.org/msg88515.html

Peter


> On 15 Dec 2023, at 18:56, Eric Joyner  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:51 AM Peter A Barlow  > wrote:
>> I’m looking at running FreeBSD on an old Firebox M270. 
>> It has a C3558 CPU with integrated X553 LAN controller which connects over 
>> MDIO to a Marvell 88E6190 switch.
>> Out of the box the X553 backplane is detected but there doesn’t seem to be 
>> any attempt at probing the MDIO for connected devices.
>> 
>> I’ve played around with the Intel ixgbe drivers, compiling the kernel etc to 
>> see if I can figure it out but I’m really struggling to understand what 
>> needs to be done.
>> 
>> At this stage I’m reaching out to the community to see if anyone can clarify 
>> something for me….are there some fundamental changes or additions required 
>> to the drivers to make this work, or is it something that should work 
>> already but needs some options enabling or configurations tweaking. I’m 
>> reluctant to put more time into trawling through the code if it’s a ‘simple’ 
>> configuration issue.
>> 
>> Any pointers would be very welcome.
>> Thank you.
> 
> I found this thread: 
> https://forum.netgate.com/topic/154974/pfsense-on-watchguard-m270/112
> 
> I think the TL;DR is that you need pfSense Plus since the required software 
> to get it to work isn't publicly available.
> 
> - Eric 

Re: Support for Firebox M270 and the Intel X553 MDIO

[Eric Joyner]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:51 AM Peter A Barlow 
wrote:

> I’m looking at running FreeBSD on an old Firebox M270.
> It has a C3558 CPU with integrated X553 LAN controller which connects over
> MDIO to a Marvell 88E6190 switch.
> Out of the box the X553 backplane is detected but there doesn’t seem to be
> any attempt at probing the MDIO for connected devices.
>
> I’ve played around with the Intel ixgbe drivers, compiling the kernel etc
> to see if I can figure it out but I’m really struggling to understand what
> needs to be done.
>
> At this stage I’m reaching out to the community to see if anyone can
> clarify something for me….are there some fundamental changes or additions
> required to the drivers to make this work, or is it something that should
> work already but needs some options enabling or configurations tweaking.
> I’m reluctant to put more time into trawling through the code if it’s a
> ‘simple’ configuration issue.
>
> Any pointers would be very welcome.
> Thank you.
>

I found this thread:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/154974/pfsense-on-watchguard-m270/112

I think the TL;DR is that you need pfSense Plus since the required software
to get it to work isn't publicly available.

- Eric