Latest update was bad news for me!
I've got an ASRock motherboard with AMD AM3 CPU and "Giga PHY RTL8211CL"
ethernet, running Wheezy. Had no joy getting the network port running
(forcedeth module would kill the whole system as soon as tried to use or
even unload it!), so I used an old (faithful) DEC Tulip card (de2104x
module). And so it ran for months (or a year or more, through a number of
linux updates) without problems.
Last week I happened to find a reference in an Ubuntu forum to
successfully getting the RTL8211 working - after consultation with ASRock.
It involved removing the forcedeth module and reinstalling it with certain
parameters. So I tried it, and it worked (without killing the system!); I
put the necessary fix in a file in /etc/modprobe.d, and that I used until
this morning. I presumably had rebooted in that time to test the fix.
This morning the latest Linux security update (DSA3128) arrived and I
installed that. It involved a restart, after which I had no network
connection - not even with the Tulip card. In fact I was back to rmmod
forcedeth killing the system (with a familiar pattern on screen - but
locked SOLID).
No, I have not been able to get the Tulip working in Wheezy, but I know it
is not dead - Puppy Linux (tahr) gets it going just fine (but has other
problems apparently from the RTL8211 which it can't connect to the
network). After some hours of frustration, I have got the RTL8211 working
in Wheezy, but it seems to involve manual loading of the forcedeth driver
after every restart.
One thing to take from this - ASRock, AMD AM3, and Linux don't play well
together.
Another is that today's de2104x module doesn't work my card.
/vent
Bruce Ward
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