I am using Slackware 11 on a new Dell 840 Poweredge. I have compiled and installed the 2.6.17.13 kernel... the system seems to work fine except I can not get the onboard network card to come up. It is a Broadcom NetXtreme and uses the tg3 driver (as I understand it.) The driver is in the modules (as tg3.ko) but ifconfig still shows only the local device (127.0.0.1).

I am fairly certain it is my lack of understanding.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions.

Thanks,

Carl

You say “The driver is in the modules (as tg3.ko)”, but did you actually insert the module into the kernel? Try doing something like “modprobe tg3”.

You may run the lsmod | grep tg3.ko to find whether the module is already loaded.

Perhaps “lsmod | grep tg3” might be more revealing (leave off the .ko).

lsmod | grep tg3 returns nothing.

modprobe tg3 returns 'Error inserting tg3 Invalid module format.

To compile the module (tg3), I added it to the make configure file using 'make menuconfig'.

Thanks to all, your responses were quicker than I thought they would be.

Thansk,

Carl

You did not need to recompile and install that 2.6.17.13 kernel, unless it was missing certain functionality that you require.
The packages you need to install are the kernel-generic, kernel-modules and kernel-source packages in the /extra/linux-2.6.17.13 directory of Slackware-11.0.

In case I misunderstood, and you knew this, but needed a self-compiled kernel, it is always a good idea to start with the kernel configuration that the Slackware default kernel uses, and make your own modifications thereafter. To do so, take the file /extra/source/linux-2.6.17.13/config-generic-2.6.17.13 and copy that to the file /usr/src/linux-2.6.17.13/.config before you run the command make menuconfig.
Your kernel configuration defaults will then be identical to Slackware's kernel and you only need to change the settings that matter to you.

Eric

The reason I compiled a new kernel was that the 840 has a couple of mirrored SATA drives that I could only see by using the test26.s or huge26.s kernels. Unfortunately, both of these install 2.4.33 if you take their kernel at the end of the install. For whatever reason, that meant that certain modules and config's were 2.4.33 and some were expecting 2.6.X. Therefore, I thought the shortest path would be to use the old config, update it where needed, compile a new kernel from the /extra/sources and use that kernel.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seemed to have helped much as the kernel still doesn't see the network adapter. From lspci, I can see the adapters (I addeed a Netgear Realtek just to see if it was struggling with the Broadcom) but with lsmod I see nothing and with modproble it returns '... Invalid module format'.

Any ideas or help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Carl

Well you must have done an incomplete install if you experience these strange things. It would be good to read the RELEASE_NOTES file and specifically the sections where it documents booting the huge26.s kernel and installing that kernel plus modules. You do not need to compile a kernel in order to get the 2.6 modules installed.

Eric

Yes, you are correct (so much for my reading comprehension.) Followed your instructions and everything now behaves normally (msprod, lsmod, etc.) although I still have one small issue (the server doesn't believe it is on the network so I can't ping it and it can't ping anyone.)

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

Carl