Re: FW: Help! m0n0wall does not run well on Intel Atom Board PART 2!!

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:13 PM, GD Incorporation
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The ON-BOARD LAN card though, still OK. Is this because I used the same
> brand of realtek cards? As usual, I tried linux ubuntu 9.04 with 2 lan cards
> on and I can access the additional card well.
>

You're comparing a recent OS (Ubuntu 9) with one that's two major
revisions behind the latest release (m0n0wall is FreeBSD 6.4, the
current stable release is 8.0). Generally that's not a problem, but if
you're using new hardware that didn't exist 2-3 years ago, it can be
(as you can see). Some work has been done to get the next m0n0wall
version up to FreeBSD 8, though I don't know when we'll see that. In
the mean time, it sounds like your hardware is not going to work
reliably on FreeBSD 6.4.

As for adding drivers or updating drivers, you generally can't with
FreeBSD without updating the base OS (or back porting drivers yourself
if you're a kernel hacker). With customized systems like m0n0wall,
bumping the base OS version comes with all kinds of other necessary
changes so it wasn't done for the 1.3x release series. You generally
can't just get a newer driver, as that ties into many other parts of
the OS, and most vendors do not provide drivers you can add. It's
simply not something that can be added to the m0n0wall GUI, you need
to roll your own image to add vendor provided drivers where they exist
(which isn't that difficult if you have some *nix experience, you can
unpack the m0n0wall release, add your driver and other changes it
requires, and re-pack it).

In general, you really need hardware that works out of the box. In
your case GD, you may have to wait until the next m0n0wall version is
out with the most recent FreeBSD base, or try pfSense which is on 7.2
in the latest stable release, and 8.1 in the beta snapshots. I suspect
your hardware probably works fine on 7.x and 8.x. Once the next
m0n0wall release is out on a newer base, your hardware should work
fine.