Debian Sarge does not recognize controllers

MALDATA · 11-05-2009, 12:27 PM

I recently posted about transplanting an old VM's hard drive onto a new PC. That thread is here.

Now that it's installed and booting, the problem has become more hardware-related. I need to get ethernet working, but it appears that the motherboard's bridge drivers are unknown on this old release of Debian.

Under a recent gentoo liveCD, lspci outputs the following:

Code:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DMI (rev 11)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 11)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Management Registers (rev 11)
00:08.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Semaphore and Scratchpad Registers (rev 11)
00:08.2 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Control and Status Registers (rev 11)
00:08.3 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Miscellaneous Registers (rev 11)
00:10.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link (rev 11)
00:10.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Routing and Protocol Registers (rev 11)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA IDE Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 2 port SATA IDE Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT200 [GeForce GT 220] (rev a2)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation Device 0be2 (rev a1)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)

Under Debian Sarge with a 2.4 kernel (which is unfortunately necessary), lspci reads:

Code:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d131 (rev 11)
0000:00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d138 (rev 11)
0000:00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d155 (rev 11)
0000:00:08.1 System peripheral: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d156 (rev 11)
0000:00:08.2 System peripheral: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d157 (rev 11)
0000:00:08.3 System peripheral: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d158 (rev 11)
0000:00:10.0 System peripheral: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d150 (rev 11)
0000:00:10.1 System peripheral: Intel Corp.: Unknown device d151 (rev 11)
0000:00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b3c (rev 05)
0000:00:1b.0 0403: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b56 (rev 05)
0000:00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b42 (rev 05)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b34 (rev 05)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev a5)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b02 (rev 05)
0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b20 (rev 05)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b30 (rev 05)
0000:00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 3b26 (rev 05)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0a20 (rev a2)
0000:01:00.1 0403: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0be2 (rev a1)
0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 1692 (rev 01)

The ethernet chip itself needs the tg3 driver, but I can't modprobe tg3... I get errors stating that there is "no such device." I suspect this is because so many controllers are unknown and probably driverless here. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks

the trooper · 11-05-2009, 12:44 PM

You can update the pci-id definition with the following command as root:

Code:

update-pciids

MALDATA · 11-05-2009, 01:45 PM

Interesting... I didn't know about that command.

Unfortunately, without an internet connection, it fails (and the goal here is to get ethernet working), but I was able to download the file from the SF page and put it on the machine from a USB drive.

So now lspci has the correct device names. I didn't realize that those were just held in a file somewhere, I thought the system had to actually recognize the devices. So, how do I actually get these things working (that is, why does modprobe fail)?

Thanks for the tip! Please let me know if you have other suggestions.

the trooper · 11-05-2009, 01:51 PM

Strange.I wasn't aware that you needed an internet connection to use that command.
Any error messages?.

MALDATA · 11-05-2009, 01:54 PM

Yeah, it just says it can't contact sourceforge to get the file.

Sorry, I edited my post above while you were responding...

the trooper · 11-05-2009, 01:59 PM

Ok,now i understand.I see why an internet connection is needed now.
Just out of curiosity where is the file located?.

MALDATA · 11-05-2009, 02:20 PM

On Debian Sarge, it's in /usr/share/misc/pci.ids

You can manually download a new copy from
http://pciids.sourceforge.net/

On Fedora, it's in /usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids

So it looks like that's basically a lookup table for the device codes. I thought that if that said "unknown," it meant the system couldn't even figure out what the device is supposed to be.

That makes this a little more difficult for me, because now I have no idea why the tg3 driver would fail to load. Also, I have another PCI ethernet card with a DP8381x chip, and that module fails to load in the same way.

One odd thing is that in the gentoo liveCD, the tg3 driver initially doesn't work. I have to rmmod tg3, then modprobe broadcom, then modprobe tg3 again. After that, the card works fine. I noticed that tg3 depends on the libphy module, also... Unfortunately, in Sarge with the 2.4 kernel, I can't find the broadcom module, nor can I find libphy. Even more unfortunately, the tg3 driver I downloaded straight from broadcom fails to compile, even though it says it should on kernel 2.4.

Thanks

the trooper · 11-05-2009, 02:32 PM

I downloaded the tg3 driver to get a look at the readme file,and i see there is an rpm version included.
You could use alien to convert the rpm to .deb file and try installing that way.

Quote:

One odd thing is that in the gentoo liveCD, the tg3 driver initially doesn't work. I have to rmmod tg3, then modprobe broadcom, then modprobe tg3 again.

I Googled the ethernet controller and found the following quote:

Quote:

Using tg3 driver in kernel, but have to load “broadcom” driver first, before loading the “tg3” driver

This is using a 2.6 kernel unfortunately.Not sure if this is relevant.
Here's the link where i found the info:

http://www.linlap.com/wiki/lenovo+ideapad+u350

the trooper · 11-05-2009, 03:06 PM

Looks like using alien was a bad suggestion.
Just tried a simulated install of the alien converted .deb,got a load of errors back.

What error messages are you getting when you try to compile?.

MALDATA · 11-05-2009, 04:33 PM

The errors were general compiler errors claiming that some variable does not exist in this scope.

I've given up on that at this point though. I found a pair of old 3Com cards that work perfectly with kernel 2.4.

Now I need to take everything I did to make 2.4.37 work and try it again on 2.4.27 (which isn't going well... what happened to the SATA PIIX drivers?).

Thanks!