Howto: Yukon/Marvell Gigabit network card

[kleeman]

I agree completely but it is up to the devs that is why I suggest we make a big fuss by adding to my bugzilla entry and possibly upping the bug severity to major....

If I was betting however I would seriously doubt whether this is going to get into Breezy....Hope I'm wrong!

[darkjedi8359]

I agree completely but it is up to the devs that is why I suggest we make a big fuss by adding to my bugzilla entry and possibly upping the bug severity to major....

If I was betting however I would seriously doubt whether this is going to get into Breezy....Hope I'm wrong!

I am just going to go and buy a network card at bestbuy or something, this one looks like it will be a hassle x_x

[mvaniersel]

I have a new PC with ASUS P5GD2 motherboard, Onboard Marvell Gigabit LAN. During installation of Hoary 5.04 I get a message "no network interface detected". Then I searched and found this howto.

So what I then tried was to go back to a Warty installation. First I tried the live CD, but networking doesn't work. Then I figure I should try a complete installation of Warty, but again during the installation process I get a "no network interface detected".

Now I'm not sure anymore that going to Warty will fix this problem. Any advice to what I might try next?


A side issue is that when the "no network interfaces detected" pops up during installation, it says "you may need to load a specific module for your network card, if you have one. For this, go back to the network hardware detection step." However, when I go back I have no idea how to do that. There doesn't seem to be a way to load a module at all.

[kleeman]

I have put up my hoary sk98lin drivers here:
http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/kleeman/hardware/
There is a 386 and a 686-smp variant.

Put them in either

/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-386/kernel/drivers/net/

OR

/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-686-smp/kernel/drivers/net/

and make sure they have the same file permissions as other modules. Let me know if this woks at all.

Also please lodge another entry on my bugzilla report at

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6142

so the developers know more people are getting annoyed by this...

[mvaniersel]

Thanks kleeman. I copied the 386 module ok using a floppy, but this doesn't solve my problem yet.

The module seems to get loaded ok, I see it back with lsmod.
With dmesg, I see there is the following error at the end of the log:

eth%d: -- ERROR --
   class : internal software error
   Nr: 0x2bd
   Msg: TWSI: transfer does not complete
sk98lin: SkGeInitAssignRamToQueues failed.

Does that tell you something? I really don't know much about these things...

[kleeman]

Doesn't look like the module was compatible. What kernel and distro are you using? Try

uname -a

to find out....

[kleeman]

If this does not work with hoary, I strongly suggest downloading the vendor driver as well as all the packages mentioned in the howto and giving them a whirl. If you have a dual boot with Windows XP you can read the files you need off the ntfs (windows) partition.

[mvaniersel]

I will try that, but it'll take some time (sigh). Unfortunately, popping in a different network card is not an option for me right now because in the system we have here the IP address is linked to the MAC address of the network card. In the mean time, here is the output of that command:

Linux Bigcat012 2.6.10-5-386 #1 Tue Apr 5 12:12:40 UTC 2005 i686 Gnu linux

That's what it should be right?

[kleeman]

Looks right. So you will need to compile your own module using the vendor script I'm afraid.

[kleeman]

I found this on the linux-netdev mailing list by Stephen Hemminger the developer for the new sky2 driver that supports the Yukon 2 card. The text in bold appears to explain why this driver is still buggy (see my bugzilla entry):

Here is revised patch against netdev sky2 branch.
It includes whitespace fixes, all the changes from the previous
review as well as some optimizations and timing fixes to
solve some of the hangs.

The stall problem is better but not perfect. It appears that
under stress the chip can't keep up with the bus
and sends a pause frame, then hangs. This version is for
testing, and hopefully other eyes might see the root
cause of the problem.

I don't want to reinvent the ugly watchdog code in the syskonnect
version of sk98lin. If you read it you will see, the original
driver writer and the hardware developer obviously didn't
understand each other.