Hi, First let me say that I'm not taking sides in the debate over binary firmware in kernel code. I am not a developer, I'm just a user who needs functionality. I'll leave it to real developers and various zealots to hammer out a final solution, but in the meantime, I need to get back to work. In that vein, I am attaching a patch that will restore the tg3 driver in 2.6.5, since it was removed by the kernel maintainer. This patch contains modifications to drivers/net/Makefile and drivers/net/Kconfig, as well as the contents of drivers/net/tg3.[ch] from the kernel.org 2.6.5 source. Apply this patch from /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.5, and you can build your own kernel with this driver included. You will need to add 'CONFIG_TIGON3=m' (or =y if you want it built-in) to the "Ethernet (1000 Mbit)" section of your .config along with whatever other changes you want to make. With a little tweaking, this could probably be made to work on the 2.4.26 tree as well, using the tg3 source from kernel.org's 2.4.26 source. I did this because I need to run a current kernel on HP ProLiant DL servers. The DL360 and DL380 models contain tg3-based Broadcom GbE NICs (aka "NC7781" on HP spec sheets) and if you run the current stock Debian kernel 2.6.5/2.4.26 you will not have network functionality. If Sarge is released containing a kernel >=2.4.26 or >=2.6.5, it will not be fully installable/functional on these servers or any other board with a built-in tg3 chip. If you rely on a tg3-based NIC you should be aware of this shortcoming. I am not sure what other ProLiants have Again, I'm not trying to start a flamewar or make a political statement, I'm just providing information that might help owners of machines with these NICs to get going again. Cheers, Eric Sproul
Attachment:
restore-tg3-driver-2.6.5.patch.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data