I have a supermicro server, and its using the X10SLL-F motherboard.

On this motherboard are two on-board nics, i210at and i217lm. One uses igb (i210at) and the other uses e1000e (i2171lm)

Is there a way, short of recompiling the kernel, to make the i210at nic use the e1000e driver?

I ask, because I've added a Silicom Fail-Open nic and it uses a modified igb driver for DNA support. As soon as I add this driver (remove the old igb), my eth0 nic is killed. The one using e1000e (eth1) is fine. If they would have just used the i2171lm for both, I'd be ok.

Thanks in advance.

The i210at and i217lm are different chips so they must use different drivers. The modified igb driver should not conflict as long as Silicom is using a different subvendor/model combination as required by the PCI standard. If the modified driver is registering the standard Intel NIC then it is a driver bug.

I get the feeling there is a way to blacklist a driver and maybe for a single nic but never looked into that.