[CentOS] Request advise regarding Driver for Intel Motherboard

Tue Sep 8 20:44:53 UTC 2009
Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at gmail.com>

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 14:12, Sanjay Arora<sanjay.k.arora at gmail.com> wrote:
> Install is CentOS 5.0. Will be updating after network starts working.
> Tried to install driver file
> realtek-r8169-kmp-smp-8.008.00_2.6.16.60_0.21-0.i586.rpm from the list
> using the rpm command....(yum would ask for dependencies and will need
> to update), but it seems that this file needs a lot of kernel
> modules....listing them below (but strangely rpm output does not seem
> to show version numbers required, instead shows a hash required. Have
> given an example at the end of list...
>
> kernel(kernel)
> kernel(drivers)
> kernel(drivers_pci)
> kernel(kernel_irq)
> kernel(init)
> kernel(net_sched)
> kernel(security)
> kernel(arch_i386_mm)
> kernel(lib)
> kernel(net_ethernet)
> kernel(mm)
> kernel(vmlinux)

This is called kABI tracking, it is supposed to work across kernel
upgrades of versions that are compatible. However, this one appears to
be built on 2.6.16 which is not compatible with the one based in
2.6.18 present in CentOS 5.

> Does this mean I will need a custom kernel and will not be able to use
> the normal kernel from centos repo or even dag repo?

If you know that the driver you need is the one for the r8169 adapter,
I suggest you grab it from the elrepo repository instead. That
repository provides kABI tracking packages of most hardware drivers
not directly supported by CentOS 5 out of the box.

I believe this is the one you want:
http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el5/i386/RPMS/kmod-r8169-6.010.00_NAPI-2.el5.elrepo.i686.rpm

Or if you're running the Xen kernel:
http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el5/i386/RPMS/kmod-r8169-xen-6.010.00_NAPI-2.el5.elrepo.i686.rpm

Once you get your network setup right, I advise you to set up the
elrepo repository (see http://elrepo.org for instructions on how to do
it) so you get updates for this module once newer versions are
released.

HTH,
Filipe