Any plan to support 4G umb (MBIM) in the next releases ?

[Oulra]

Hello everyone,

I've been using a 4G PPP connection with an EM7565 modem for several years now, and FreeBSD 15 now supports the use of the umb driver for MBIM interfacing.

I just tried it manually by playing around with umbctl, and it's pretty simple to set up. I lose the ability to have automatic outbound NAT rules, but other than that, the connection is night and day! I've more than doubled my download and upload speeds, and the latency has improved dramatically.

So I'm pretty excited about the idea of being able to use it properly, and I'm wondering if there are plans to support this natively within the OPNsense core in the future?

Here's some info for anyone interested in switching my EM7565 to MBIM mode:

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cu -l /dev/cuaU0.0
AT!ENTERCND="A710"
AT!USBCOMP=1,1,100D
Load the umb driver by adding umb_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.local and reboot.

After rebooting, verify that the umb0 interface appears, then configure the APN number, PIN, and enable roaming by creating a file umb.conf:

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apn=Free
pin=0000
roaming
Initiate the connection:

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umbctl -f umb.conf umb0
All that's left is to assign your interface to umb0 (IPv4 None), add the gateway manually, add NAT rules and you're good to go!

[Maurice]

Official MBIM support in OPNsense would be great, but I'm not sure the umb driver in its current state would be suitable.

umb(4) was originally developed for OpenBSD in 2016 and ported to NetBSD in 2018. The NetBSD port was then ported to FreeBSD for a commercial closed source project (a plugin for OPNsense 19.7, funnily enough). This code was then open sourced in 2022, which is how it finally made it into FreeBSD 15.0.

While the original OpenBSD code is actively maintained, the FreeBSD port is essentially a snapshot from 2018. None of the improvements the OpenBSD driver received over the last 8 years - like support for additional modems and IPv6 - made it into FreeBSD.

Unless someone picks up the FreeBSD port and brings it into this decade, I'm not sure adding it to OPNsense would be worth the effort.

Just my interpretation of the status quo, not a complaint.

Cheers
Maurice


Source: About a year ago, I did a bit of testing with umb on all three BSDs, accompanied by some digging in commit histories and bug trackers.