Just in case someone comes across this thread, searching for Intel I225-V support …
The
igc(4) driver was MFCed to stable/13 this week. It supports the Intel I225-V ethernet NICs that are becoming very popular on consumer hardware.
That driver is included in the
latest stable/13 snapshot (20210819) right now, and it will be included in 13.1-RELEASE.
I recently ordered an HM80 mini PC from Minisforum (
link to product page) that also has a 2.5 GbE Intel I225-V NIC, in addition to an “old-fashioned” 1 GbE Realtek NIC. Both of them now work fine with FreeBSD stable/13 out of the box.
Contrary to popular believe, the Realtek NIC (
re(4)) also works perfectly fine. It might not be as sophisticated as some Intel NICs, but I have zero problems with it whatsoever, even under heavy load serving NFS traffic and several video streams in parallel. I guss some people still have the problems of the old FastEthernet
rl(4) in their minds – these were badly designed indeed. But that was 20 years ago. The
re(4) NICs today are different beasts.