To avoid completely hi-jacking
@BoredSysadmin's new thread I am going to reply here - in his 20-month old thread instead...
The 5xxx/7xxx series controllers had ROMless version of PM8001 - the driver was responsible for loading firmware. So the OS support was let's say limited. For the two 7000 units I had I ended up removing all connectors but power altogether. This way I could just power it up from a chassis already being controlled by another 8000 unit without messing it up. It was like a mini blade server - 2 independent systems in the same 2U chassis. 8000 controlling the backplane/storage and 7000 running pfsense. There was no actual reason to do that - the 8000 could have run pfsense in a VM. But I thought it was cool.