Activation of FreeBSD Broadcom network cards driver

FreeBSD contains drivers for numerous network cards. However, not all cards are activated by default. This Wiki article shows how to activate the bnxt driver for Broadcom network cards with BCM57416, BCM57412 or BCM57414 NIC-chip in FreeBSD 13. It does not matter if the NIC chip is on a Broadcom network card (for example P210TP or P225P) or on a mainboard (for example Supermicro H13SSL-NT). Information on activating the driver under OPNsense can be found in the article Activation of OPNsense Chelsio Mellanox Broadcom network cards driver.

Deactivated driver

If you start the system after the installation, the network card will not be recognized completely:

Activation of driver

You have to add a line in the /boot/loader.conf file that the driver is loaded.

Perform the following command for this:

vi /boot/loader.conf

In the open configuration file, press the "j" key until you reach the last line. Then press the "o" key to add a new line below, in which you add the following line:

if_bnxt_load="YES"

Finally, press "ESC", "Shift", ":", in that order and type "x" to save and close the file.

The file can look like this:

Finally, the system must be restarted.

The network cards are now recognized:

Translator: Alina Ranzinger Alina has been working at Thomas-Krenn.AG since 2024. After her training as multilingual business assistant, she got her job as assistant of the Product Management and is responsible for the translation of texts and for the organisation of the department.