Here's the situation:
I got the linux driver for Netgear's FA311 Network Card from www.skyld.com that uses the National Semiconductor Chip.

I am using RedHat 7.2

The new drivers COMPILE just fine (with a change in the source to use linux/slab.h instead of malloc.h because of deprecation)

The pci-scan.o drivers goes into the kernel just fine with 'insmod pci-scan.o'

however, the actual driver: natsemi.o also compiles just fine. When I 'insmod natsemi.o' to test it, I get:

'natsemi.o: init_module: No such device
Hint: incorrect insmod errors module parameters including invalid IO or IRQ parameters'

It appears that init_module is a function located in the driver, however I didn't not find a function call for that function anywhere in the whole driver. But the file had way too many pre-processor commands for me to attempt to go commenting stuff.

Anyway......the driver does compile, but won't insmod correctly.

My Netgear card is recognized, but when I 'lspci -v', I get a listing that doesn't have an IRQ # on it. All the other listings have one except the card.

I tried install the drivers into /lib/..... anyway, and went to linuxconf, but it fails to initialize the card.

Does ANYONE have any suggestions? I would really appreciate. I pretty much exhausted all the details above. Thanks.

extra info:
lspci -v gives:
O1:0a.O Ethernet Controller National Semiconductor
Subsystem: Netgear: Unknown device f311
Flags: bus master, fast Back2Back, medium devsel, latency 90
IO ports: 2800 disabled size=256
Memory @ f4101000 (non=prefetchable) disabled size=4k
Expansion rom at <unassigned> 64k

Notice no IRQ# listed.

THANKS guys.
:smash:

I haven't used RedHat 7.2 on this computer for a while, but it was on my router until recently. My computer has a FA311 and as far as I know the natsemi.o module is in the kernel that ships with RedHat 7.2 (2.4.8-pre9 is it?). Otherwise you could just get a new kernel because I'm on 2.4.17 and it's definitely included.

make menuconfig on your kernel source and see if there is a natsemi module under network devices. The easiest way to go if there is one would be to compile it as a module and it should install automagically when you boot!

Hope this helps

yeah natsemi module does come with RH 7.2.
Here's what I did to get it to work:
add this line "alias eth0 natsemi" to /etc/modules.conf
then run kudzu again, and it should recognize the card.