RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

Tue Apr 10 01:08:05 UTC 2007

Matt,

I'm not sure of the answer to your question about anaconda. But I have been
able to work around the problem. It turns out that RHEL3 U7 is loading via
network install without any problem. To the best of my knowledge, I've used
the same procedure for setting up my pxe kickstart as with U8 (extracting
the boot kernel and initrd image from the distribution, etc). Since my goal
is just to get some version of RHEL3 loaded (via network install) onto my
new server (SunFire X2100 M2), that has now been accomplished with U7
without any additional driver disk, rebuilding drivers, etc. RHEL3/U7 and
RHEL4/U3 worked without any problems, but I could never get RHEL3/U8 to work
(via network install). I suspect the boot tg3 driver in the boot image, but
operator error is still a possibility.

Thanks for the suggestions,

Doug

  _____  

From: Matt Rose [mailto:mattrose at folkwolf.net] 
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 6:35 PM
To: Discussion list about Kickstart
Subject: Re: RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

I guess it's not the same one.  Do you have the proper kernel-BOOT image,
and the proper version of anaconda?  You might want to make sure that
anaconda is up to date.  I would check
/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/loader2/module-info (I'm not sure that location is
correct, but it should be around there)  to make sure that anaconda
recognizes the card, and installs the correct module.

Matt

On 9-Apr-07, at 12:11 PM, Doug Rylaarsdam wrote:

Regarding the question that someone asked about which Broadcom devices were
in the server (I'm currently missing that email to include here), this is
the pci information. The tg3 driver was installed during the RHEL3u8 CD
installation, so I'm suspecting that the tg3 is the driver at issue in the
boot image for the network install. I've been able to do a network install
of RHEL4u3 on this hardware, but not RHEL3u8.

06:04.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5715 Gigabit
Ethernet (rev a3)

        Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5715 Gigabit Ethernet

        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 15

        Memory at fdff0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]

        Memory at fdfe0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]

        Capabilities: [40] PCI-X non-bridge device.

        Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2

        Capabilities: [50] Vital Product Data

        Capabilities: [58] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/3
Enable-

06:04.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5715 Gigabit
Ethernet (rev a3)

        Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5715 Gigabit Ethernet

        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10

        Memory at fdfc0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]

        Memory at fdfb0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]

        Capabilities: [40] PCI-X non-bridge device.

        Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2

        Capabilities: [50] Vital Product Data

        Capabilities: [58] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/3
Enable-

Thanks,

Doug

  _____  

From: Shabazian, Chip [mailto:Chip.Shabazian at bankofamerica.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 2:35 PM
To: Discussion list about Kickstart
Subject: RE: RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

Not sure why you are having this issue then.  I would go back to Sun and
tell them you need a driver disk (both IBM and HP supply driver disks in
this scenario).  You then simply load the driver during the build:
dd=http://path_to/disk.img

Chip

  _____  

From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Doug Rylaarsdam
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 12:24 PM
To: 'Discussion list about Kickstart'
Subject: RE: RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

Yes, I'm using the same setup as my RHEL3U3 kickstarts. I'm using the same
DHCP and tftp server. I've added the RHEL3U8 distribution to the kickstart
server, and added a target in the pxelinux configuration with the vmlinuz
kernel and initrd.img from the U8 distribution. For the network setup, the
kickstart server uses a second NIC to support the kickstart clients. I
simply connect the client machine directly to an unmanaged layer2 switch
(Linksys EF4124), which is where the second interface on the kickstart
server is also located.

Doug

  _____  

From: Shabazian, Chip [mailto:Chip.Shabazian at bankofamerica.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 2:01 PM
To: Discussion list about Kickstart
Subject: RE: RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

Are you on the same switch and subnet that you have previously had good
kickstarts from?  This is USUALLY an error related to portfast and Cisco
switches.  The fact that the install works fine using the included driver
when you build from CD adds to my suspicion that this is network, not NIC
related.

Chip

  _____  

From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Doug Rylaarsdam
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 11:36 AM
To: kickstart-list at redhat.com
Subject: RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

Hi,

I am having a NIC driver problem with pxe kickstart of RHEL3 update 8 on
some new hardware (Sun X2100 M2).

The vendor documentation indicates that RHEL3 U7 or later has compatible
drivers for this server. When I install RHEL3 U8 from CD, it works ok. When
I attempt a pxe kickstart, it appears that the NIC driver is not compatible.
I get the "no network device in choosenetworkinterface" message. I have been
kickstarting RHEL3U3 for some time (on older hardware), so I think in
general that I have a working pxe kickstart server environment.

The NIC is a Broadcom device. The server vendor supplies the Broadcom
drivers, but not in binary form for RHEL3 U8. Based on my limited
understanding of how this works, I would need to build the tg3 driver from
source against the boot kernel (2.4.21-47.ELBOOT) if I want to use the
Broadcom NIC for a network install. Then I would need to add the new driver
to the initrd image, or make it available as a driver disk. When I look
inside the initrd image, the tg3.o driver is definitely not identical to the
tg3.o driver from the CD install, although that doesn't prove that the tg3
driver available during kickstart is incompatible with my hardware. 

Does it seem likely that RHEL3 U8 would contain a compatible driver for the
Broadcom NIC for the 2.4.21-47.EL kernel, but that the driver for the boot
kernel is not compatible? That seemed odd to me, so I thought I would ask
the question before proceeding with building the driver from source,
somewhat unfamiliar territory for me (especially building for boot kernels).
Or might there be another cause to this problem? 

Thanks,

Doug

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