Broadcom ethernet and x64

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I have an old HP sff tower and would like to put OpenWrt x64 on it, but it has Broadcom Netxtreme BCM5754 ethernet, given the lack of open source support from Broadcom for wireless I'm just wondering if ethernet is supported at all, a look at available packages shows kmod-tg3 so I thought it might be possible and just wondering if anyone would happen to know if it would work?

edit - this might answer my question -

New Broadcom devices with gigabit Ethernet are supported by the bgmac kernel driver.

2

Pretty easy to get Intel NICs and slap em in too.

3 Likes
3

Broadcom SOC and ethernet support tends to be active and pushed to mainline regularly, very different from the situation for xDSL or WLAN (with the notable exception of their fullmac/ brcmfmac designs).

3 Likes
4

Thanks to you both, that's good to know, looks like I've got my weekend project then.

5

Yes don't worry about the Broadcom Ethernet chip working. It is their wifi chips that are poorly supported. I think that tg3 is one of the drivers in a default X86 build.

If not you will need to install it separately. One way to do that is to mount your rootfs device on a Linux desktop and copy the .ipk file somewhere on it. Then switch to the target system and boot OpenWrt and run opkg to install from the file.

2 Likes