help with NICs on my new nForce 4 mobo

edM · 03-25-2006, 09:40 AM

Hi,
I recently upgraded my PC last week to a MSi K8N daimond (nForce 4 SLI), 4800+ and X900XT-X

I backed up all my important files on a sata drive, although these are mostly media and such, not actually amny config files as i decided to do a fresh install for the first time in 2 years!

sound - working
usb - working
printer - working
NICs - problem
SATA - not tried
Graphics Card - set to VESA for now (back burner)

The most annoying problem is getting one of my NIC cards to work. there are two, a nForce4 SLI one, and a Marvell 88E8053. I dual boot, and on WinXP i ma using the Marvell NIC.

I am using the 2.6.16 kernel, in 'Networking' the Marvell 88E053 isnt listed, the closet one is xxxx51, but i built in anyway and no luck. I then went to the Marvell website after looking through others problems of this NIC, and downloaded the latest driver.

unloaded the old driver, and patched the kernel. in the Netowrking / Marvell my card is listed.

but when i went to biuld as built in i got this:

Code:

In file included from drivers/net/sk98lin/skge.c:76:
drivers/net/sk98lin/h/skdrv2nd.h:64:7: warning "CONFIG_NET_POLL_CONTROLLER" is not defined
drivers/net/sk98lin/skge.c:301: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
CC   drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.0
In file included from drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.c:34:
drivers/net/sk98lin/h/skdrv2nd.h:64:7: warning "CONFIG_NET_POLL_CONTROLLER" is not defined
drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.0.c:340:5: warning "USE_SYNC_TX_QUEUE" is not defined
drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.0.c:905:5: warning "USE_SYNC_TX_QUEUE" is not defined
 drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.0.c: In function 'GiveTxBufferToHw':
 drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.0.c:996: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
 drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.0.c:2314:5 warning "USE_SYNC_TX_QUEUE" is not defined
make[3]: *** [drivers/net/sk98lin/sky2.0] Error 1
make[2]: *** [drivers/net/sk98lin] Error 2
make[1]: *** [drivers/net] Error 2
make: *** [drivers] Error 2

a similar thing happened when i built it as a modules.

any help most appreciated!

thanks

RobertP · 03-25-2006, 10:32 AM

The easiest thing may be to replace the NIC with a garden variety Realtek NIC or something equally common. You can buy them for $5 and they work out of the box. If your time is cheaper, you might look at the code (isn't Open Source wonderful?) to see what the warnings are about. Read any notes or READMEs and look at the options in ./configure --help, if there was such a step. Otherwise Google and LQ are your friends.

You might try to identify the chipset to see if there are other drivers for that. These NICs are pretty simple. It is a chipset hanging on a PCI slot.

edM · 03-25-2006, 12:31 PM

well that wasnt hard, i installed the nForce linux drivers from Nvidia and the 2nd NIC worked.

meh i probably would never of gotten the Marvell one to work.

but anyway yay

fskmh · 03-26-2006, 04:23 AM

I have used the SysKonnect driver for this NIC for kernels 2.6.11 through 2.6.15 and it works fine. Kernel support for the 8053 came in around 2.6.13, but I've had mixed results with it, so I am still using the Marvell 8.28 driver.
I got curious about the compile errors posted here so I tried the 8.31 driver with 2.6.16. It patches cleanly but I get a similar compile time error. I will see if I get some time to play around with this.

edM · 03-26-2006, 03:52 PM

fskmh,

ok i think will try the Syskonnect driver just to see if it does work. if you have 2 NICs should you only keep one driver installed, to possible conflicts between the two different NIC drivers?

i would be interested if you did make any progress with the comipler error.