Hi! I'm having a spot of trouble getting a second NIC to work in my new Linux box, and was wondering whether there's a way to ascertain whether the card's faulty without installing Windows on the box.

Going into BIOS prior to booting the system shows a card in the slot with vendor and device IDs 10EC:0021, which makes sense since the card is a Realtek RTL8029 (yeah, fairly old but I just need any working NIC to set up a basic router/firewall). The card is one that I've used in the past, but not with Linux (it came out of one of our OS/2 boxes some years ago).

When I boot into Linux, the device sometimes doesn't appear in lspci at all. It seems to appear and disappear.

(It's up now, and lspci is saying that the device id is 8021. I'm going to assume that I misread it off the BIOS screen.)

When it's not there:
$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579V Gigabit Network Connection (rev 05)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b5)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation H67 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 1040 (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation HDMI Audio stub (rev a1)
02:00.0 PCI bridge: Integrated Technology Express, Inc. Device 8892 (rev 10)
04:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04)

When it is:
$ lspci
... all identical above ...
02:00.0 PCI bridge: Integrated Technology Express, Inc. Device 8892 (rev 10)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8021
04:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04)

So my question has two parts: Firstly, is there a way to force Linux to show me a lower-level view of the PCI bus? It's seemingly not finding the device when the BIOS is. And secondly, where can I find out if device 10EC:8021 is supported by Linux? It seems to be an unrecognized device id; I looked it up on http://www.pcidatabase.com/search.ph...earch_str=8021 and got no results. Other people have reported RTL8029 cards being recognized under Ubuntu (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1284781 has lspci showing "Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8029(AS)"), so perhaps this is a different chipset.

I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 amd64, 2.6.35-30-generic kernel.

If it turns out that I need to go buy myself a NIC, so be it. It'd save a lot of hassle if I can use this one though, and Realtek cards have generally been fairly reliable for us.

Any assistance will be much appreciated!

My guess is the nic is dodgey but you may want to check out your bios setup and make sure plug & play is disabled if there is such a setting. It's not used in linux and has been known to cause problems on occasion.

/Thinks back 10 years
They disappear when they get an interrupt they don't like. There are a couple of saved options (Update EDID or something like that in the bios). Using 'noapic' on the boot line cut the messing to 16 irqs and they worked - 10 years ago. It's the half assed irqs (22, 47 ) they can't cope with. That hardware was a 90s design.

lspci doesn't read the bios as far as I recall. It re-reads the pci bus for it's own use.

I'd move the cards around to different slots and re-test.

8029 is from the last millenium.

The pci cards save irq values etc, and the 8029 won't work with an irq it hasn't saved as one of it's defaults. I had this 10 years back - the thing would work on irq 11 but was invisible on irq 12. It won't like the half-assed irqs things run on these days. I forget how you check this. run lspci -vv and see what it says about the nic when it's not working. Compare this with cat /proc/interrupts

In the end I gave up on trying to get this card going and brute-forced the issue by getting a new one. Thanks for the advice, all; unfortunately I couldn't pinpoint the cause any better. I'll call this "problem solved" even though technically it's just "problem dodged".

Hmm. The email told me to use Thread Tools, Mark as Solved, but I'm not finding that there. Perhaps I need to earn the right to mark threads as solved? In any case, the issue's closed unless someone has some brilliant ideas - I do still have the card, if anything needs to be tried, but it's now a mere curiosity.

It's usually above the first post on right side.

Ah, strange. I had Thread Tools there with only three entries in it (Show Printable, Email this Page, and Unsubscribe), but now the same menu is there with more options. There's also another drop-down there, Rate Thread, which wasn't there before. Perhaps it's something to do with my having made enough posts, or maybe it's a difference with no longer being the last poster in the thread... anyway, there it is.

Worked now. Thanks EDDY1.