Re: Question about my Ethernet Cards

["Boxuan Gu" <boxuan@gmail.com>]

Hello, Ben,

Thank you for your email very much! However, when I used apt-get
source linux-2.6, it seemed that the patch 12 has been applied
automatically. Do I need to apply patch 12 again?

What I am confused is that, the kernel image gotten from "updating"
can support tg3 but the kernel image built from its source codes
(Linux Kernel 2.6.26) can't. I don't know why.

Boxuan Gu
.
On 1/14/09, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 17:56 -0500, Boxuan Gu wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> When I opened "/usr/src/linux_2_6_26/drivers/net/Kconfig", I found the
>> following:
>>
>> config TIGON3
>>        tristate "Broadcom Tigon3 support"
>>        depends on BROKEN
>>        depends on PCI
>>
>> I don't know what does "BROKEN" mean. I couldn't find where to set BROKEN.
>>
>> I removed "depends on BROKEN" and then executed "make menuconfig", I
>> could find the option for tg3. However, during the building of the
>> kernel, there were many comoiling errors for  tg3.c. I think some
>> symbols in tg3.c depend on other source files.
>>
>> Could you please tell me why? What does "BROKEN mean" ?  How can I
>> solve this problem? Thank you very much!
>
> The "upstream" tarball for linux-2.6 is patched to remove much of the
> firmware that we do not have source code for.  This causes the drivers
> that included that firmware to be broken, so they are marked as such.
> The Debian diff includes patches that fix most of these drivers so that
> they can load firmware from separate files.  However "apt-get source"
> does not apply those patches; you need to use debian/rules to do that.
>
> It is usually easier to build your own kernel from linux-source-$VERSION
> which has those patches already applied (but not patches for special
> flavours like xen).
>
> Ben.
>
>


-- 
Boxuan Gu