Can't find Intel EtherExpress isa NIC

[Chris Whitehouse]

Well after some more poking around it finally works. It turns out that the ie driver was removed from the probe sequence at boot because of instabilities.

07/06/03 13:07:27, Bruce M Simpson <bms at spc.org> wrote:
>Please see the following link. This should have been committed to RELENG_4
>a few weeks ago, but I'm including it in case you haven't/can't cvsup yet.
>http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/share/man/man5/Attic/kernel.conf.5?rev=1.1.2.2&content-type=text/plain

Thanks for this link to the kernel.conf man page which was very useful.

Probably not many people are still using this old stuff but in case anyone has the same problem here's my setup using 4.8.

1) Check/set the NIC parameters with the dos utility softset.exe. I can email a copy if anyone wants one (or a dos boot disk image with various NIC setup utilities). 
Recommended settings (see patch details below) are irq=10, port=300, mem=32K at D0000 or irq=11, port=260, mem=32K at C8000. Mine was 10, 260, D0000.

2) Reserve appropriate irq and iomem in BIOS

3) Setup /boot/kernel.conf. Although my card was visible in userconfig without a kernel.conf it didn't seem to have 32k of mem allocated.
My kernel.conf goes

enable ie0
port ie0 0x260
irq ie0 10
iomem ie0 0xd0000
iosize ie0 32
flags ie0 0
quit

4) Set the ie driver parameters in the kernel configuration file, eg
device          ie0     at isa? port 0x260 irq 10 iomem 0xd0000

5) See http://www.jfitz.com/tips/freebsd_etherexpress16.html for a driver patch. There are two patches, one for the driver, if_ie.c.patch and one to reinclude the 
etherexpress in the probe sequence, isa_compat.h.patch. The ie driver in 4.8 already includes one of the lines in the driver patch so I guessed the patch might not be 
required so I just patched isa_compat.h. I might try patching the driver as well sometime but it works for me as is.

The example entry for the kernel configuration file on his web page has an extra option 'net' which didn't work for me, make failed. Maybe it's for an older version of 
FreeBSD.

6) Recompile the kernel and the card should appear.

Thanks for all suggestions and help.

Chris