Bug 364791
| Summary: | e1000 driver doesn't support the Intel 82566DM-2 (found on new Dell desktops) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 | Reporter: | andrew m. boardman <amb> |
| Component: | kernel | Assignee: | Red Hat Kernel Manager <kernel-mgr> |
| Status: | CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE | QA Contact: | Martin Jenner <mjenner> |
| Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | low | ||
| Version: | 4.5 | CC: | agospoda, ballan, hiroto.shibuya, jesse.brandeburg, tao, wdc |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2009-02-10 22:24:01 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
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Description
andrew m. boardman
2007-11-02 21:53:49 UTC
The specific affected Dell hardware we're using is the Optiplex 755. I see in a status update, that this bug has been re-classified from "Red Hat Enterprise" to "Red Hat Enterprise 4", but without further explanation. That is incorrect. The driver is not present in BOTH RHEL 4.5 and RHEL 5.0. The good news is that the problem has been resolved. The bad news is that the crucial information is not yet in this bug. Ideally, someone at Red Hat, presumably having access to the relevant beta roadmaps and unfettered access to the read-restricted bugzilla bugs would have been able to quickly learn and report what I have been able to unearth through hours of wading through google output, making guesses about things, and then verifying by directly emailing the engineer who was apparently doing the device driver integration. The Ethernet chip Intel 82566DM-2 is supported in the new e1000e driver. Although there is some support for this chip in the latest revision of the e1000 driver served up from source forge, some have considered that support kludgy. Going forward, the expectation is that the e1000e driver will support PCI express Ethernet chips, and the latest chips, and that the e1000 driver will be in a maintenance mode. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Update 1, which went live on Wednesday 7 November 2007 contains the e1000e driver back-ported to the 2.6.18 kernel of RHEL 5. An errata for RHEL 5 contains the relevant kernel rpms: https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2007-0959.html Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 update 6, which went live on Thursday 15 November 2007 contains the e1000e driver back-ported to the 2.6.9 kernel of RHEL 4. An errata for RHEL 4 contains the relevant kernel rpms: https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2007-0791.html This chip, and many other of the same epoch are now well supported and are part of a sensible canon going forward. Red Hat missed the chance to give everyone a quick and easy message that the right thing was happening. Instead the Red Hat Enterprise community remained in the dark until a paying customer did the difficult detective work of finding out what Red Hat internally knew and could have trivially shared. It is my hope that by saying so much against how this bug was handled that I'm able to help Red Hat see that a little more resourcing of the Bugzilla handling personnel would be of benefit. Andrew, I was going to save Red Hat the trouble of closing this bug, but I don't own the bug. Someone should close this bug with status "ERRATTA", now that we know it's actually not a problem. Thanks for the feedback on this, I am sorry that the process was drawn out and a bit confusing. I will close this one out. |