From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050512 Red Hat/1.0.4-1.4.1 MSIE/6.0 Description of problem: On a Dell X300 laptop the tg3 network driver does not seem to detect the network at all, when connected to a Cisco GigE switch port. When connected to a 100MBit switch it works. When downscaling the switch port on the Cisco side, it works as well. Booting the laptop via PXE happily gives the PXE screen, so it seems to be an issue with the tg3 driver. Trying to tune the tg3 card via ethtool (setting speed, duplex etc) did not bring any different results either. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.9-11.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. connect laptop to GigE switchport 2. ifup eth0 - no joy 3. connect laptop to 100M switchport or downscale switchport 4. ifup eth0 - works, happy dhcp. Actual Results: "Check cable" message Expected Results: Happy dhcp'ing network device getting an IP Address Additional info:
jgarcia
Does it work w/ the Cisco switch if you use a statically assigned IP address?
Yes
Is the Cisco switch configured for spanning tree protocol (STP) on that port? If so, it should be turned-off. STP doesn't serve much purpose on a "leaf" port (i.e. a port connected to an end-station) anyway. STP progresses a newly activated port through a number of stages in which the link is physically active, but the switch is not allowing it to communicate to the rest of the network. Since the physical link is active, the DHCP client proceeds to issue requests. Since the switch is still not passing traffic on that port, the DHCP requests go unanswered. Often the DHCP client will timeout and give-up before STP on the switch has transition the port to a forwarding state. All of the above can be avoided by disabling STP on the switch port (or by using a static IP address). Does disabling STP (presuming that it is currently active) improve the situation for you?
Thank you but we already checked that as first thing and STP was and is disabled on that port (default for our user ports). And we would get the same problems or at least the 30 seconds delay while the switchport is throttled to 100 Mbit but there it works flawlessly. We also checked that the port has trunking explicitly disabled and not on auto sensing. We tried also a different port and cable.
I do have RHEL4 test kernels w/ a tg3 driver update available here: http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/rhel4/ Let's start by trying those kernels to see if things clear-up? Even if not, we'll need to start w/ that as a base. Please post the results of your testing here...thanks!
New kernels at the same location, w/ latest tg3 driver from upstream...FYI...
Closing due to lack of response. Please re-open when current testing information becomes available.