This firmware is being removed from the kfreebsd kernel leaving no (easy) possibility to use kfreebsd on such a server as there is no possibility to load non-free firmware at runtime, like we do on Linux. Its neither (easily) possible to rebuild the kernel from scratch including firmware, as the Debian specific patches don't cleanly apply if the firmware is not being removed and the resulting source tree is not easily to be built from source afterwards.
Here is the recipe for building own kernel with bce 1) get debian directory from kfreebsd-8 source package either from our svn or by i.e. wget http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/pool/main/k/kfreebsd-8/kfreebsd-8_8.2-7.debian.tar.gz mkdir kfreebsd-8 cd kfreebsd-8 tar zxf ../kfreebsd-8_8.2-7.debian.tar.gz 2) in debian/rules comment out cd $(ORIG_DIR) && $(CURDIR)/debian/prune.sh 3) in debian/patches/series comment out 999_firmware.diff 4) debian/rules get-orig-source 5) extract just created .orig.tar.gz tar zxf ../kfreebsd-8_8.2.orig.tar.gz mv kfreebsd-8-8.2/* . 6) dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc $ find debian/kfreebsd-image-8.2-1-amd64/ -name *bce* debian/kfreebsd-image-8.2-1-amd64/lib/modules/8.2-1-amd64/if_bce.ko Petr