On-board LAN Card Issue [SOLVED]

[Anaryu]

I've had quite a few problems getting Gentoo installed, part is that I have touched Linux since old Red-hat 7.x days and I was most familiar with the SPARC 6.2 version, so forgive me if I'm unfamiliar with some newer tools that may easily help resolve this issue.

I had problems with onboard RAID chips on the K7 Triton Gigabyte motherboard, hoping I can resolve these with some Kernel configurations later but did finally get some work arounds for it, the final problem I've had with the installation is that the onboard LAN card is not working. The problem is something I've never seen, and putting in a Linksys 10/100 Etherfast PCI card didn't help either, I was getting "nobody cared!" errors about IRQ 17, and it's fairly important the onboard one works if possible.

Details:
The computer is connected via a tested (several times) and working cable to a workgroup switch (Linksys EZXS88W) which has also been tested and is working. Other machines connected through the same hardware work fine.

Hardware:
Motherboard: K7 Triton nForce2 chipset by Gigabyte (GA-7N400 Pro2)
Onboard Ethernet card: Realtek 8110S Gigabit (Enabled in BIOS)

The problem itself is what's confusing me, the installation detects it fine (theoretically) and a dmesg | grep eth returns:
eth0: Identified chip type is 'RTL8169s/8110s'.
eth0: RTL8169 at 0xf887e000, (MAC Address), IRQ 10
r8169: eth0: link up
r8169: eth0: link up

(MAC Address) is a valid (and correct) MAC address for the onboard card. (Sorry, have no intentions of listing it here. )

Using LiveCD 2004.3

Attempted in gentoo:
net-setup eth0 - Configuring through DHCP (which should work) and statically
--Once set up statically it claims 'network unreachable' for any valid network, should be obtaining a 192.168.21.x address.
--DHCP gets no IP address, etc.

/etc/init.d/net.eth0 start (or restart or stop then start):
* Bringing eth0 down... [ok]
* Bringing eth0 up (192.168.0.2) [ok]
--It should be unable to get a 0.2 address, and I'm assuming this is some kind of default "It's not working" value (so it doesn't get a gateway default address, etc).
Also tried the dhcpcd -HD and dhcpcd commands (as shown in install guide) and no luck.

Attempted fixes outside gentoo:
Disabled onboard Firewire and USB channels which were using the same IRQ (would that be a problem?)
Tried to boot with a 'gentoo nohotplug nodhcp'

I've been searching around for similar problems, hoping for a clue or two, and several of the things I tried were inspired by other issues, but no luck so far. Any troubleshooting pointers with new Gentoo tools I don't know about, possible fixes, or even guesses would be welcome. I'd rather not do the full installation off the LiveCD without a network card, I continued for a while, but it was starting to look like not having a network connection was starting to really mess up my installation, and a messy installation a messy server makes.

[kimchi_sg]

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-254143-start-0-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-irq+nobody+cared.html

Does this topic describe your problem?

P.S. There are several wildly different solutions to this problem it seems, please Search the forums for "irq nobody cared", a lot of people have had this problem already.

[Anaryu]

Sorry if I was a bit unclear, the "nobody cared!" IRQ error was only for the PCI card I put in. The onboard card doesn't give those errors.

I tried the stuff listed in that topic with no success, but I did remember one thing, I get a "r8169: eth0: PHY reset until link up" error now and then. Searching on that now, but thanks for the idea.

During boot a APCI Contoller gets IRQ 9, is that related to APIC at all?

[Anaryu]

Toying around and popping in that PCI card again and trying to 'noapic' has gotten me going with the rest of the hardware now. Took some fiddling with the settings and some cable swapping, but I think I'm good to go.

Thanks for the help, I figured it was something easy and stupid I'd missed.

[kimchi_sg]

If the problem doesn't appear anymore, please insert [SOLVED] into the title of your first message in this topic.

[Anaryu]

Done.

Thanks again, a little more research and now that I know what the problem was, I'm able to get the BIOS RAID chips working fine and BIOS RAID mirrored SATA drives takes a huge chunk of work out of this project.