I bought 3 Asus M2V motherboards to install FreeBSD 6.2 on to act as departmental servers. Unfortunately the onboard gigabit EtherNet controller (an Attansic L1) is not supported under FreeBSD with a native driver.
It can however, be made to work using the Windows 2003 64bit (NDIS) driver that comes on the CD with the motherboard.
I installed the all of the components in the case, configured the BIOS, installed FreeBSD 6.2 AMD64, selected "Configure", then "Networking", then "Interfaces" only to find that my sparkling new motherboard had a netwrok card that was not supported. I fired up my laptop and found a couple of posts to the FreeBSD current mailing list from people with exactly the same problem ... no one had offered a solution.
Dejected I thought I was going to have to rob a NIC from an old PC when I remembered reading an article in the days of FreeBSD 5.1 (link here) about using the Windows NDIS drivers for wireless cards that didn't have BSD drvers ... I went hunting. Probably the most helpful source was the FreeBSD web site itself. I typed "NDIS" in to the search box and found this page.
Here is what I did:
- Inserted the "M2V series - VIA K8T890 Chipset Support CD Rev.234.04" in to the CDROM drive
- typed "cd /root" (so that I knew where I was)
- typed "mount /cdrom"
- typed "cp /cdrom/Drivers/LAN/WinXP2003_64/* /root"
- typed "ndisgen /root/atl01_64.inf /root/atl01_64.sys"
- pressed [Enter] a number of times until I got to the "Firmware file conversion" screen
- at the prompt I entered "/root/atcInst.dll", it liked that and answered "Conversion was successful"
- pressed [Enter], then [Enter] a few more times until ... "The file atl01_64_sys.ko has been successfully generated."
- pressed [Enter]
- I tested it by typing "kldload /root/atl01_64_sys.ko"
I was now able to configure the card either by using sysinstall or directly with ifconfig. I did have a problem with the auto-negotiation of speed, the hub I was connected to only supported 10/100, so I had to manually adjust the speed to get it to talk.
It is a bit of a pain having to manually load the driver at every boot, what happens when the server is deployed and the power fails at 02:00 AM, I am not going to the office!!
- type "cp /root/atl01_64_sys.ko /boot/modules"
- type "echo if_ndis_load="YES" >> /boot/loader.conf"
- type "echo ndis_load="YES" >> /boot/loader.conf"
- type "echo arl01_64_sys_load="YES" >> /boot/loader.conf"
I am just about to reboot to see if this works ... fingers crossed.
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