Older NIC emulation (before Gigabit)

[sasdrq]

I tried to install an old release of FreeBSD (4.4) yesterday and the OS didn't recognize the NICs. My mac pro has two NICs and a more current release of FreeBSD (8.2) sees them as:

em0: <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Legacy Network Connection 1.0.3>

This driver was not available in FreeBSD 4.4 so I had no network. I tried using:

Default Adapter
Ethernet 2
vnic0

But 4.4 didn't recognize any of them.

I ended up using VirtualBox to solve this problem. It allows you to emulate various NICs instead of giving you no choices. VirtualBox offers: PCnet-PCI II, PCnet-FAST III, as well as several Intel PRO (gigabit) NICs. The PCnet-PCI II worked for me (and FreeBSD 4.4).

Has anyone else solved an issue such as this with an older OS with no drivers for the newer mac hardware?

Will Parallels ever offer older hardware emulation?

[Elric]

I tried to install an old release of FreeBSD (4.4) yesterday and the OS didn't recognize the NICs. My mac pro has two NICs and a more current release of FreeBSD (8.2) sees them as:

em0: <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Legacy Network Connection 1.0.3>

This driver was not available in FreeBSD 4.4 so I had no network.

Hi,
it is possible to switch to Realtek8029 emulation:
Open virtual machine configuration, switch to Hardware tab and in Boot order section add the string "devices.net.force_adapter_type=rtl" under boot flags:



I don't know whether this applies to BSD4.4, but when networking is in the rtl-mode, it is possible to install paravirtualized network driver (by Alexander Nedotsukov) which provides good networking performance in this mode: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cg...rallels-tools/

[sasdrq]

That works! FreeBSD 4.4 recognized the device as:

ed0: <NE2000 PCI Ethernet (RealTek 8029)> port 0x8200-0x821f mem 0xee000000-0xee0fffff irq 7 at device 5.0 on pci0
ed0: address 00:1c:42:0b:ef:c2, type NE2000 (16 bit)

I defined it and now can communicate to the world:

ed0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::21c:42ff:fe0b:efc2%ed0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
inet 10.17.12.33 netmask 0xffff0000 broadcast 10.17.255.255
ether 00:1c:42:0b:ef:c2

Thanks.

What other network adapter types are available? Is this documented anywhere?

[Elric]

What other network adapter types are available? Is this documented anywhere?

Glad to hear that problem is solved

Unfortunately, afaik it is not documented anywhere (except in parallels knowledge base) for Parallels Desktop. So far there are only two network types available: rtl and e1000

[aphor]

FYI, in Parallels 6 you can switch from the newer emulated Intel Pro/1000 to the older emulated RealTek 8029 by making this change to this (for each) NIC setting in the config.pvs while the VM is turned off:

- <AdapterType>2</AdapterType>
+ <AdapterType>1</AdapterType>