# NIC not working; bge driver maybe? newbie



## stankirk (Mar 13, 2010)

Totally new to FreeBSD. Mostly new to Unix. Very experienced with Windows, back to MS-DOS days. Experienced with networking and NICs. Have used Linux and MacOSX command line stuff a little. Trying to go to FreeBSD.

Installed FreeBSD 8 *64-bit* on Dell Latitude E5400 laptop with Core 2 Duo in multi-boot with Windows XP and Windows 7. BTW, the multiboot part of it made that quite an ordeal. FreeBSD is booting fine.

This laptop has 2 NICs, one wired one wireless. I'm just asking about the wired, regular Ethernet NIC here. Let's just get that one going for now.

It is Broadcom 5756ME, part of their NetXtreme line.

After some looking around at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/config-network-setup.html I decided that the bge device adapter should work. The links on http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/bge/ as well as info on the Broadcom driver page at http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/netxtreme_desktop.php made me think that. Specifically 5755M is mentioned in http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/bge/if_bge.c, and the Broadcom site shows that 5755 and 5756 use the same driver.

But bge does NOT show up during startup.

And the ifconfig command shows only
fwe0
fwip0
lo0
which I understand to be firewire and loopback. And only loopback is showing "UP".

I checked the kernel GENERIC config and "device bge" is in it. Also, since I did not know what else to do I tried adding if_bge_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf, but there was no change. So I removed that from loader.conf.

I read on http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/config-network-setup.html that you can use Windows NDIS drivers, if you have to. And I have not done that yet, because it seems like bge should work.

What am I doing wrong?


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## teckk (Mar 14, 2010)

> But bge does NOT show up during startup.


The device should show up in

```
dmesg | less
```
Scroll down through the list and see if the device is detected. If not then it isn't working. The kernel module won't load if the device is not detected. Broadcom usually has poor support on BSD.
If your device shows up in dmesg then you'll have to find a module that works, use a wrapper to try and get it to work, or just use another device. I've never had luck with broadcom crap on BSD


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## stankirk (Mar 16, 2010)

*now what?*



			
				teckk said:
			
		

> The device should show up in
> 
> ```
> dmesg | less
> ...



teckk, thank you very much for responding, and for directing me to dmesg, which I did not know existed. Ok, so I'm looking at the /var/run/dmesg.boot file.

The line that seems to be relevant says

```
pci9: <network,ethernet> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)
```

This link looks similar http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.freebsd.bugs/browse_thread/thread/8ae4b8bc8b8a2288

I'm still totally stuck, having no idea how to proceed.


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## Glebushka (Mar 16, 2010)

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/bge/if_bge.c
Revision 1.226.2.16

Looks like you should try upgrading to 8-STABLE, or probably just try booting a snapshot of 8-STABLE from here ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/201002/ to see if a card is detected.


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