Simen Thoresen wrote:
Hi all,
Same system as my previous mail - Asus P5N32-E SLI motherboards, CentOS 4 x86_64.
The kernel-supplied forcedeth driver works in kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.0.9.EL (both with and without acpi=off), but after upgrading to kernel-smp-2.6.9-67.0.4.EL, networking does not start. After trying dhcp, ifconfig reports 17 dropped TX packets (all other counters are empty). Ethtool reports the same settings for working and non-working kernel, and both report the link arbitrated to 1000Mbps. Setting a manual address does not do anything useful either.
When booting with 55.0.9, networking works again.
This has also been confirmed on another system - 2.6.9-55.0.12.EL works, and 2.6.9-67.EL fails (but this system is not available for troubleshooting right now).
Also, the above system was attempted installed with CentOS 5 (.0 and later with 5.1), but this was aborted due to 'networking problems', so I am thinking that the problem possibly persists at least as late as the CentOS 5.1 install-kernel.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
One of these is probably your issue (from the RHEL-4 kernel changelog):
* Tue Oct 23 2007 Jason Baron jbaron@redhat.com [2.6.9-65] -forcedeth: fix nic poll that causes panics on some hardware (Andy Gospodarek) [337291]
<snip>
* Mon Jun 18 2007 Jason Baron jbaron@redhat.com [2.6.9-55.9] -forcedeth: update to driver version 0.60 (Andy Gospodarek) [221910]
I would make SURE that I had the latest BIOS (firmware) update for the motherboard as those routinely fix problems with built on NICs and built on controllers.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes