General Questions

so I've got an Intel i340-T4, I set up another full-fledged freebsd machine, compiled the driver, and nabbed the .ko file.  I found the directory that achi.ko lives in in monowall (I think it was ahci.ko...it was something with four letters that started with 'a')  so I dumpped my ko in there

instructions say to add a line to /boot/loader.conf which I can't seem to find, and all I can find is a loader.rc
are these the same?  if I want to invoke loading the driver at boot, where do i tell it to?

thanks in advance

Which version of m0n0wall are you trying to use this card with?

I installed m0n0wall from the cdrom-1.34.iso
which I think is the latest stable release

Try using the latest 1.8.1 beta as it is built on a later version of FreeBSD which is more likely to have the driver you need compiled into the kernel.

looking over the readme for the intel driver, I came across this:

"NOTE: This driver package is to be used only as a standalone archive and the
user should not attempt to incorporate it into the kernel source tree."

which I take to mean that this specific driver won't/legally can't be integrated in freebsd or monowall; I hope I'm wrong.

my target system panics on kernel load when I try to boot the latest snapshot, but I was curious to see how easy/hard it was to add drivers and such to monowall for more academic purposes/future reference.

Thanks again

I am not a m0n0wall developer. But I can say that the kernel is monolithic. That is, drivers are compiled into the kernel as opposed to being loaded at runtime via kernel objects. In cases where a specific driver is already compiled into the kernel, it's not possible to replace it with one loaded via a kernel object.

There are some threads in the forum/project web/mail list site that deal with image modification, and perhaps that approach might yield results.

I have no doubts that the driver for your card will be or is already compiled into a recent version of FreeBSD. The question becomes is that same version being used by m0n0wall yet?

You say have a full fledged FreeBSD machine you used to compile the driver. What version of FreeBSD is that? And what version of m0n0wall's FreeBSD does it align with? If the version of FreeBSD that works out of the box with your card is a later version than being used by specific builds of m0n0wall, then waiting for m0n0wall to catch up should solve the problem, but I admit this may not be timely.

As an aside, have you tried the recent (2.0.2 and 2.1) builds of pfsense to see if they have included the driver there? Inclusion there, especially on the same FreeBSD bases, might move things along here on m0n0wall quicker.

Good luck with your endeavor. Perhaps one of the m0n0wall developers can help you.

my target system panics on kernel load when I try to boot the latest snapshot

is the kernel panic a result of adding the driver manually to the build? are you referring to the latest 1.8 snapshot or the 1.3 branch? if you did get the panic on the 1.8 snapshot can you try the 1.8.1b520 (18-Oct-2012) build and let me know if you still experience the same problem. i'm getting a page fault using the latest 1.8 snapshot but using the 1.8.1b520 build or lower I don't have any issues. just wondering if your issue is related to mine. thanks.