imminent nervous breakdown with sis900 built-in NIC

benca1 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 76

Man, there's a lot of posts on this one, and I've read them all. I have the ECS K7S5A mobo with the sis900 built in NIC.

LiveCD (1.4. r3) has no problems. Once I log out of the chroot'ed environment and reboot, no network. None. Zilch. I've recompiled that friggin kernel so many times. Yes, I compiled sis900 into the kernel.

I tried making a new kernel from what boots LiveCD (with gentoo-sources and not the xfs kernel). Nada.

I tried passing various kernel arguments from grub. Nada.

/proc/pci sees the interface! Nothing else does. But on a hardware level, it's there. I have a 3com 3C905 right in my stupid hand, but I'm too pissed that I'm too stoopid to make my new system work when the LiveCD doesn't have any problems!

Thanks so much for any assistance. And you can flame me too, I need it. I'm a sys-admin at SGI and I can't fix this!

Prozac please.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2003 8:32 pm Post subject:

benca1,

The kernel on the LiveCD is built with modules. Boot the LiveCD and have a look with lsmod to see which module it loads.

Now roll yourself a kernel like that.

Regards,

NeddySeagoon
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

benca1 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 76

Thanks Ned.

You know what? This is a problem. I see a lot of error messages related to building modules. modprobe and insmod return nothing. Of coruse I have 'sis900' in my /etc/modules.autoload.

I don't know how to verify if my modules are getting built at all. I copy and paste the command right from the gentoo documentation and then I cp the bzImage right over to /boot.

I'm positive that I'm doing something wrong here or missing something.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2003 9:08 pm Post subject:

benca1,

If insmod and/or modprobe return nothing then the module was inserted OK. If the module was installed by /etc/modules.autoload they should complain about the module already being installed.

Does lsmod show your modules as actually being inserted?

You have been doing make modules and make modules_install I suppose?

You have been mounting /boot before copying bzImage?
If you use lilo you must rerun lilo or it will just load your old kernel.
Bear in mind that kernel loading is accomplished without using the filesystem.

Look in /lib/modules/<kernel_version>/... to see if they are there.

Next time you doa kernel build, edit the exravalue field at the top of the kernel Makefile. After you boot it you can check the version to make sure its really your new kernel running.

Regards,

NeddySeagoon
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2003 9:09 pm Post subject:

benca1,

If insmod and/or modprobe return nothing then the module was inserted OK. If the module was installed by /etc/modules.autoload they should complain about the module already being installed.

Does lsmod show your modules as actually being inserted?

You have been doing make modules and make modules_install I suppose?

You have been mounting /boot before copying bzImage?
If you use lilo you must rerun lilo or it will just load your old kernel.
Bear in mind that kernel loading is accomplished without using the filesystem.

Look in /lib/modules/<kernel_version>/... to see if they are there.

Next time you doa kernel build, edit the exravalue field at the top of the kernel Makefile. After you boot it you can check the version to make sure its really your new kernel running.

Regards,

NeddySeagoon
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

benca1 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 76

GMFTatsujin · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Jan 2003 Posts: 104

Personally, I like building drivers that NICs and such right into the kernel. Call me crazy.

Anyway, I had a problem with a computer with the onboard SIS900 as well. This was about 8 months ago, so the details are fuzzy, but anyway: dmesg revealed that the device was found and brought up. The trick was that the SIS900 had two MII transcievers on it -- one was for Ethernet, the other was for some goofy networking jack that used regular phone lines.

When the device was brought up, it would always default to the phone-line jack and would ignore the RJ-45 jack, even though there was traffic only on the RJ-45. There was no way to force the driver to chose one jack over the other -- the auto detecting routine was just plain broken.

I submitted a bug to the maintainer as listed in the source. He never got back to me, and I couldn't find any reference to anyone else who might have taken the code up in the meantime. I asked around on kernel.org, but never really got anywhere with it. I spent MONTHS ripping my hair on just trying to get a live net connection, and it got me nowhere.

My advice - junk the goddamn thing. Replace it if you can, or burn it if you can't. Be sure you get every last molecule into the fire or it'll JUST COME BACK. Like a witch. Or Agent Smith. Throw holy water on it for good measure.

Florian Holzinger · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2003 9:38 pm Post subject:

i had the same problem with the gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r5 kernel, i tried the gs-sources-2.4.22_pre2 and it works fine. :wink:

benca1 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 76

rhammack · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 11 Location: Findlay, OH

I just installed from the 1.4_rc4 livecd on a K7S5A system with a Duron 800
I built the sis900 driver into the kernel and have had no problems with networking

sis900.c: v1.08.06 9/24/2002
PCI: Found IRQ 5 for device 00:01.1
PCI: Sharing IRQ 5 with 00:0b.0
eth0: Realtek RTL8201 PHY transceiver found at address 1.
eth0: Using transceiver found at address 1 as default
eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xd000, IRQ 5, 00:07:95:f5:6c:c8.

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:07:95:F5:6C:C8
inet addr:192.168.1.3 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:260467 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:218181 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:885 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:273855801 (261.1 Mb) TX bytes:21451054 (20.4 Mb)
Interrupt:5 Base address:0xd000

Have you tried just compiling in the sis900 driver?

Robb Hammack <robb@rhammack.com>
_________________
"Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our Group, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why."

benca1 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 76

I've compiled in the sis900 driver several times, but I'm not altogether sure I've been successful making it a module.

I have yet to try a different kernel, and I think I'm rev backward with my livecd...

benca1 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 76

I burned the 1.4_rc4 LiveCD. Now everything works. This one is much nicer then rc3.

Thanks for the help.

Curious · Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 1:50 pm Post subject:

I noticed a similar problem ( finally ) getting my P4 finished with all its building and rebooting it today. I noticed that the kernel log is no longer mentioning it's enabling the TX lockup workaround anymore and - surprise surprise, the log is also full of TX lockups. I think Jeff took this out of the kernel in 2.4.20. I also suspect it might be back, safe and sound, by 2.4.22 ( thanks to Alan, I think ). So you might want to try that.

-- Curious
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