From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20021216 Description of problem: I just installed Phoebe on my new Pentium 4 system which has an Asus P4PE motherboard with an on-board Broadcom Ethernet Adapter. This adapter was not recognized during the installation, since there was no driver for it in the kernel. Asus provides a GPL Linux driver (bcm4400) for this adapter on the CD they distribute with the P4PE motherboard. I would like to see this driver become part of the standard Red Hat kernel distribution. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Phoebe on a system with a P4PE motherboard. 2. Observe that no Ethernet adaptor is found during the installation. 3. Manually install the bcm4400 driver from ASUS after the installation, insmod bcm4400.o, and then configure networking with redhat-config-network. 4. Observe that Ethernet connectivity to the Internet now works. Actual Results: See above. Expected Results: See above. Additional info: The driver is GPL, so there so be no problems incorporating it into Red Hat distributions. This driver, and other drivers for on-board components of the P4PE motherboard, are available on the Asus web site at http://www.asus.com.tw/support/download/download.aspx (enter keyword p4pe).
This problem also exists in RH8...new Dell PCs have been shipping with BC4400/BC4401 integrated NICs for a while now. I just got a Dimension 2325 with one...it was quite a pain to track down the drivers...it should absolutely be included in Phoebe, and potentially as an update for RH8. I'll also file a bug report about the lack of support for Intel 845-based graphics cards that are also now common on Dell PCs and others.
I have experienced transmit timeouts with this driver under heavy network and system load. The following message appears in /var/log/messages: kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out And networking is hosed until I stop and restart eth0. A proposed fix: modify b44um.c to increase the transmit timeout from (2*HZ) to (5*HZ): < #define TX_TIMEOUT (5*HZ) --- > #define TX_TIMEOUT (2*HZ) If the driver is basically sane, but just gets overloaded during periods of high traffic, this may help. It will increase the interval before the kernel watchdog timer kicks in to declare the transmitter is hung. Many other network drivers have TX_TIMEOUT set to (4*HZ) or (5*HZ), so this is not an unreasonable thing to try. If Red Hat incorporates this driver into 8.1, the above change should be seriously considered. Initial tests of this fix, with high-volume traffic into and out of eth0, with near 100% CPU utilization, resulted in no transmit timeouts. (Tests conducted on a 2.8GHz P4 running Red Hat 8.0, kernel 2.4.18-19.8.0, with 100Mbps ethernet).
we are actually considering backporting the driver from the 2.5 kernel series instead, which is quite different..
You'll have a lot of work to do. According to Dave Miller, the b44 driver from the 2.5 kernel is "totally nonfunctional": From: "David S. Miller" <davem> To: ron_olsen Subject: Re: Broadcom 4401 Linux drivers Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 23:50:42 -0800 (PST) From: <ron_olsen>(Ron Olsen) Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 23:48:14 -0700 Ron> Would the b44 driver from kernel 2.5.47 work on 2.4.18 or 2.4.19? The b44 driver is still totally nonfunctional.
Created attachment 89631 [details] Updated Broadcom ethernet driver (bcm4400-1.0.2.tar.gz) Michael Chan <mchan>, the author of the bcm4400 driver, just sent me an updated version which should fix the "hang on transmit timeout" problem. This new version re-enables interrupts when the timeout error occurs. I am attaching the new version of the driver (1.0.2). It would be great if Red Hat includes this driver in the 8.1 release (and also as an update to 8.0) if they decide not to try to backport the 2.5 kernel b44 driver to the 2.4 kernel.
The 1.0.2 version of bcm4400 is looking good. I just got the following report from Vic Hendrickx <vik.heyndrickx> : I have installed this driver 1.0.2 today, and I was unable to recreate the tx timeouts I had before with 1.0.1. Furthermore, I ran this horrific load test: I downloaded 73GB from a local FTP server (Ethernet) onto the broadcom NIC PC while I was "flood"-pinging another host, AND while this bcm PC was being "flood"-pinged by two other hosts at 100Mbps (all connected to a 10/100 switch). All 73GB were downloaded without any interruption.
*** Bug 76516 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I have also tested bcm4400-1.0.2 quite extensively and to mee it seems stable. I vote for an inclusion
> I have also tested bcm4400-1.0.2 quite extensively and to mee it seems > stable. I vote for an inclusion 1.0.2 is a bit old, lastest is 2.0.2 : http://www.broadcom.com/docs/driver-download.html in general bcm drivers are awful, Someone wrote about it ;-) "The Broadcom Tigon3 boards arrived, but looking at their driver made me want to scratch my eyeballs out. I think I'll write the 2.4.x driver from scratch, thank you. At least, I can print out their driver and use that when we run out of toilet paper here at the apartment" but you are lucky, Someone has written a 'official kernel driver' for Broadcom 4400 NICs, you can get it from : http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/patchkits/2.4/2.4.22-pre8-netdrvr1.patch.bz2
Yes, I am adding this b44 net driver to Red Hat Linux real soon now, in fact :)
So does that mean we'll be seeing Broadcom 440x support in the version of RHL coming out in October? I noticed that it wasn't included in Severn... (nor was the option of 1680x1050 resolution available for my dell inspiron 8500's widescreen display, tho some XF86Config tweaking fixed that)
I can report success with the b44 driver that is a part of the kernel in severn2 just released
"Real soon now"... meaning? About the time Duke Nuke'm Forever is released? ;)
b44 driver is available in RHEL3 and Fedora Core.