Re: Problem: 2.6.x and network (e1000 Intel 82546EB)
On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, "W. Borgert" <debacle@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> after installing a fresh sarge on a Sun (dual XEON) with two
> e1000 Intel 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller everything
> worked fine so far with the default 2.4.x kernel. But after
> changing to 2.6.x the network just does not work anymore. I
> use e1000 as the driver and the official kernel images
> (kernel-image-2.6.[34]-1-686-smp. Of course, I looked in
> /var/log/* for interesting messages, but got nothing out of
> it. rmmod e1000; modprobe e1000; /etc/init.d/networking
> restart gave "Ignoring unknown interface eth0=hotplug" and
> "Ignoring unknown interface eth1=hotplug". Hotplug?
>
> Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
This is something I ran into on one of my Intel SE7501WV2 systems. The
problem is that the 82546EB is a dual Ethernet controller, and
evidently, something has changed in the e1000 driver between 2.4.x and
2.6.x that affects the ordering of which port gets assigend as eth0 and
which as eth1. The simple solution is to switch network ports, but that
is inconvenient if you need to switch kernel versions.
Looking at the driver source code, I don't see any module parameters
that will tell the 2.6.x driver to revert to port ordering behavior of
the 2.4.x driver.
If it is any consolation, the 2.6.x way seems "right" to me -- the ports
on my server's chassis are labeled "1" and "2". Under 2.4.x, the port
labeled "2" was eth0, which always bugged me. Under 2.6.x, eth0 is now
the port labeled "1" and eth1 is the port labeled "2".
As for the "eth0=hotplug", this has been well discussed in regards to
the ifupdown and hotplug tools. The solution here is to add stanzas
into /etc/network/interfaces as you will find documented in
/usr/share/doc/hotplug/README.Debian.
Hope that helps,
Steve Williams
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