On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, Ben Hutchings wrote:
When the ethernet adapter is not detected, is it visible using "lspci"? If not, this is probably a hardware fault. If it does appear but the driver fails to initialise it, please report a bug including the kernel log messages.
The device works under the PXE BIOS, and worked fine under the original Windows XP install before I blew that away for Debian. When the device does not show under lspci, the kernel driver of couse does not load as the device wasn't detected. When is does show in lspci, the driver autoloads without incident. I found two other reports of the device randomly failing detection when I googled, so others are seeing this.
I've looked over the logs carefully, and there doesn't seem to be anything at all interesting. The only difference is that when it is detected, the driver post message shows. That's all I can find.
[ 17.574509] sky2 0000:02:00.0: v1.20 addr 0xfebfc000 irq 17 Yukon-FE+ (0xb8) rev 0
[ 17.579928] sky2 eth1: addr 00:24:81:41:af:9d