Hey everyone. I got this working in Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10, but it definitely felt hacky. I'm sure that I'm not doing this the right way, but it works.
My guess is that udev and/or the inbox driver for the brocade adapter is specifying the firmware file ctfw-3.2.1.0.bin, explicitly. Even if you put a newer driver in the /lib/firmware directory, it still doesn't load; it's insistent on 3.2.1.0, which is not only out of date, but not specifically available from Brocade on their site, as far as I can tell. This said, it's not crazy to do this. From experience, adapter drivers and firmware operate in lockstep and you shouldn't really mix the release levels up. In this case I didn't have much choice. And perhaps it has everything to do with my occasional problems with the adapter, maybe.
So. If you were so inclined, what you can try is getting ctfw-3.2.1.1 from one of Brocade's firmware packages, and copying that to the /lib/firmware directory. It still won't load, and insists on 3.2.1.0, however. To address this, I symlinked ctfw-3.2.1.1.bin to ctfw-3.2.1.0.bin in /lib/firmware. After unloading/reloading bna, it works.
Despite this, the system won't boot with the adapter loaded. I put together a hacky init script set up to basically run `rmmod bna; modprobe bna` one more time somewhere during boot.
A better explanation: When you/boot runs `modprobe bna` and it fails, it stays in that broken-loaded state. Running modprobe again won't do anything new for you, as it's "already loaded" in a sense. Unload it, then load it agian).
After this, you should see the Brocade network ports in ifconfig afterwards.
If you're using the FCoE part of the adapter, do the same with cbfw and ct2fw, like above.
I noticed that 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)'s linux-firmware package contains some firmware files of interest:
/lib/firmware/ct2fw-3.2.1.1.bin
/lib/firmware/ct2fw-3.2.3.0.bin
/lib/firmware/ctfw-3.2.1.1.bin
/lib/firmware/ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin
This suggests to me that the inbox driver has been updated and everything should just work out of the box. I'll post my experience soon - that is, if the daily I'm installing from right now doesn't break my system.
The best way to address all of this was to find a way to compile the Brocade driver and not to use the inbox one, however their noarch/generic Linux driver won't compile on Ubuntu. I never really figured it out - I feel it's a fundamental problem/difference between a build environment on RedHat/CentOS/Fedora, compared to what Ubuntu is doing. You can't install the RPM via Alien for the same reasons.
To name build issue, it's the replacement of /bin/sh with dash (
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh) on Ubuntu. Despite reverting this back to /bin/sh, or changing some part of the compiling process to use /bin/bash instead, I didn't have much more luck. There's still some pretty elementary broken stuff going on for compiling and I really just don't have the technical know-how to get past that.
Oh, and regarding cables, I'm using some direct-connect Active Twinax cables+SFPs. Provided you're using fairly recent firmware, you can use third-party SFPs, not just Brocade's.
Edit: 14.04 successfully loads its inbox driver and a newer firmware was included, no tweaks or hacks needed. It's still behind what Brocade supplies, but I'll take a working solution!
It also broke my bonding config, but restarting networking solves that. Oh, Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ifenslave-2.6/+bug/1280366
Edit 2: If you try a fresh 14.04 install and the firmware is missing, install the package linux-firmware.
