[CentOS] Latest 6.2 kernel is broken

Tue Apr 24 15:05:26 UTC 2012
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 24/04/12 15:56, Lars Hecking wrote:
> Peter Kjellstr??m writes:
>> On Monday 23 April 2012 17.54.33 Lars Hecking wrote:
>>>   I just kickstarted a new machine with the latest CentOS 6.2 files,
>>> including kernel 2.6.32-220.13.1.el6.x86_64. It came up without network
>>> interfaces.
>>>
>>>   dmesg says:
>>> bnx2: Can't load firmware file "bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1b.fw"
>>
>> This is because you have the kmod-bnx2 package which contains a newer driver
>> (2.2.1) but not a complete set of firmwares (two out of five files missing).
>
>   Looks like a vanilla kernel bug.
>
>    http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/4/17/268
>
>> This machine is using the normal bnx2 driver (2.1.11) for which there is a
>> complete set of firmwares (provided by the kernel-firmware package).
>
>   Spot on - the working machine did not have kmod-bnx2 installed.
>
>> If you don't need the 2.2.1 driver I suggest you remove the kmod-bnx2 package
>> from the first machine and fall back to the driver in the normal kernel
>> package.
>
>   Installing without kmod-bnx2 worked, and I also had to get rid of kmod-cnic,
>   which /tmp/yum.log listed as requiring kmod-bnx2.
>

This is fixed in RHEL6.3 (beta) where the kernel-firmware package 
contains the latest firmware that you are missing above:

$ rpm -q kernel-firmware
kernel-firmware-2.6.32-262.el6.noarch
$ rpm -ql kernel-firmware | grep bnx2-mips
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-5.0.0.j6.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-6.0.15.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-6.2.1.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-6.2.3.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-5.0.0.j15.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-5.0.0.j3.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.0.17.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1a.fw
/lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1b.fw

In the meantime (as a workaround), just grab the missing firmware and 
place it in the appropriate directory.