Gentoo: "network interface eth0 does not exist" after kernel downgrade
 

Hello, I'm having trouble getting my network working with Gentoo after downgrading the kernel from 2.6.26 to 2.6.24. Let me explain my situation:

I started by installing the latest stable kernel version (2.6.26-gentoo-r3), and everything was working fine. I want to use tuxonice to handle hibernation, but it looks like my only options at this point are to patch 2.6.26 with an unstable version of tuxonice, or use an earlier kernel version. I decided the easiest thing would be to emerge the latest stable pre-patched kernel, "2.6.24-tuxonice-r9". I copied over my kernel configuration, compiled the new kernel, and updated my grub.conf. After booting, I get the following error when running 'net.eth0 start':

"network interface eth0 does not exist
Please verify hardware or kernel module (driver)"

I have an integrated intel PRO/1000 interface, and have compiled the driver as a module.

lspci shows that the hardware is recognized by the system, and dmesg shows the network driver (e1000e) as being loaded, but it mentions nothing about eth0. Also, eth0 works fine when I boot with the 2.6.26 kernel.

Anyone have any idea what's going on?

Thanks

With the 2.6.24 kernel what is the output of;
ifconfig -a

Thanks for the response, but I had decided to take the arduous (but "sure") way out and reinstalled gentoo, this time using the masked 2.6.26-tuxonice sources. The main reason I reinstalled was to (hopefully) fix another issue caused by hibernation, involving my usb-serial adapter not being recognized by udev.

Now I can hibernate, and eth0 works fine. Unfortunately I am still seeing these usb issues, but that's for another thread.

Since you asked, I did run ifconfig -a while I still had 2.6.24 installed, and it showed "lo" but not "eth0".