Bge not detected in Solaris 10.

Question

Dear users,
I just loaded Solaris 10 in a Dell Latitutde D630, yet I am unable to get network access because neither the physical NIC nor the Wireless adapter were detected. Doing a /usr/X11/bin/scanpci I determine that my station has a Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express at the physical level and at the wireless level it has a Intel Pro/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN adapter.
I tried doing a rem_drv bge and add_drv -i "pci14e4,1673" bge but the output is showing devfsadm: driver failed to attach: bge this is follow by a Warning: Driver (bge) succesfully added to system but failed to attach, any one have a clue to this problem. Please advise. Thank you.

Answer 1

I was able to get the local NIC working, I had to download the driver from Broadcom, the driver you want is Ethernet NIC NetXtreme Server Driver. make sure you run:
unzip sol86-11.7.2.zip
In this case you can see that the file downloaded was a zip. When you unzip the file, it will create a directory under wherever you are working, in my case it was called sol86, since I was using a flash drive from a machine that I download the drive my path in solaris was /rmdisk/unamed_rmdisk/sol86, your path may be different depending in the name of your flash drive in my case I didn't have a name so it showed unamed....
The next step was to go one level inside the folder.
cd /rmdisk/unamed_rmdisk/sol86/
This will give you a set of four files, one with .pkg and three others, we want to focus in BRCMbcme.pkg which is the actual package for the drive. I must tell you that at this point you got to make sure that you dont have a SUNWbge package in your system as it will caused conflict with the new driver. We can check that using pkginfo |less and going through the list of packages in the list. If you find SUNWbge in the list make sure you run pkgrm SUNWbge and unsintall the package, once that is done you are ready to install the BMCE driver. Again, be sure you are in /rmdisk/unamed_rmdisk/sol86/ , once there run pkgadd -d BRCMbcme.pkg it will install your new driver.
After the driver gets installl we make sure its there by doing a pkginfo | less again to verified. At this point make sure you don't have any bge references in /etc/path_to_inst , this can be done via vi /etc/path_to_inst or whatever editor you like.
The next step would be doing “touch /reconfigure” and reboot the system, once the system get rebooted I saw:
bcme0: Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet BCM95755M (Copper) is detected
bcme: [ID 981347 kern.notice] NOTICE: bcme0: Firmware version 5755m-v3.29
bcme: [ID 801593 kern.notice] NOTICE: bcme0: No Link
bcme: [ID 801593 kern.notice] NOTICE: bcme0: Link is Up (100Mbps, Full Duplex)
Since this particular network card is 100Mb/s, you want to make sure you edit your /kernel/drv/bcme.conf with the proper value of 4 giving you 100Mb/s full duplex if that is your choice. Make sure that hostname.bcme0 is under /etc if it doesn't exist just create one using touch /etc/hostname.bcme0, meaning that bcme0 is running in instance 0 as you can check from dmesg. After this, make sure you configure the standard files of /etc/hosts, /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/resolv.conf to make sure DNS is configure properly.
If you cannot determine the instance number using prtconf, try doing a dmesg | less and look for the bcme entry, it will surely display. Make sure to plumb the adapter using ifconfig bcme0 plumb and then configure the adapter using ifconfig bcme0 ip_address netmask, where ip_address will be substituted for your own IP similar to your own netmask. To make this change permanent, make sure you create a /etc/hostname.bcme0 as stated before and inside that file type your own IP then make sure your subnetmask is type inside the file /etc/netmasks. For more information you can always do a man bcme as i did to learn more about the driver. I hope this help, I am out for now need to find information about the wireless adapter now. If I find time, I will post a follow up for the wireless once I get it working. Take care and good luck.