Daemonic Dispatches

FreeBSD msk(4) and XPS M1530 ethernet

Last year I bought a new laptop: An XPS M1530. I've been generally quite happy with it, but it had one major flaw: Its (wired) ethernet support was provided via the Marvell Yukon 88E8040 Fast Ethernet chipset, which was not supported by FreeBSD -- and so I've been connecting to the outside world via the laptop's wireless ethernet (an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG chipset) for the past 10 months. Effective a few hours ago, this is no longer necessary.

Pyun YongHyeon (aka. yongari@) made a series of commits to FreeBSD's msk(4) driver and the associated PHY code yesterday and today which added support for the 88E8040 chipset in FreeBSD -CURRENT. I don't run -CURRENT on this laptop; but I merged the updated code back to my 7.2-RELEASE tree and was surprised to see that everything worked without needing any backporting fixes. Hence

# cd /usr && cvs -d /usr/cvsroot co -r RELENG_7_2 src
# cd /usr/src/sys/dev/msk && cvs up -C -A
# cd /usr/src/sys/dev/mii && cvs up -C -A
# cd /usr/src && make buildkernel installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC

and rebooting is all it takes to get this working on FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. I imagine yongari will merge the relevant code back to the 7-STABLE branch before 7.3-RELEASE; so the Marvell Yukon 88E8040 Fast Ethernet chipset should work in all FreeBSD releases numbered 7.3 and higher.

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