[CentOS] Release 4.4 and MPC51 ethernet controller

[Collins Richey]

On 9/3/06, William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 21:49 -0500, Paul wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 10:35 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 11:00 -0400, Jerry Geis wrote:
> > > > <snip>
>
> > I think the issue is with the Realtek RTL8211 Gigabit Ethernet
> > controller that the board uses and not the nVidia chipset.
> >
> > A quick solution might be to find any 10/100 NIC and see if that works
> > instead.  I looked and did not find what module to load for the RTL-8211
> > chip.
>
> Knowing how the various releases of chips are often so common in a
> family, maybe it matches the RTL 8169/8110s on a NIC card in one of my
> machines? The driver loaded for that is r8169. Give it a try after boot.
> If it works, you can pop it into your initrd, update init or configs and
> make a new initrd.
>

Just an FYI. I have  an MCP51 board (Gateway GT4016), and the NIC
works just fine on CentOS 4.3/4.4.

The only hitch is that the forcedeth driver has a major bug for
dual-boot users. Running the NIC from Windows leaves the card in a
state that the forcedeth driver cannot handle after a warm reboot. You
have to unplug the box from power to reset the card. I don't know when
and if the upstream provider will backport the latest forcedeth
patches to correct the problem.

This is not a Red Hat / CentOS problem - the most common versions of
forcedeth have thesame failing on any distro.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.