RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

[Doug Rylaarsdam]

Hi,

 

I am having a NIC driver problem with pxe kickstart of RHEL3 update 8 on
some new hardware (Sun X2100 M2).

 

The vendor documentation indicates that RHEL3 U7 or later has compatible
drivers for this server. When I install RHEL3 U8 from CD, it works ok. When
I attempt a pxe kickstart, it appears that the NIC driver is not compatible.
I get the "no network device in choosenetworkinterface" message. I have been
kickstarting RHEL3U3 for some time (on older hardware), so I think in
general that I have a working pxe kickstart server environment.

 

The NIC is a Broadcom device. The server vendor supplies the Broadcom
drivers, but not in binary form for RHEL3 U8. Based on my limited
understanding of how this works, I would need to build the tg3 driver from
source against the boot kernel (2.4.21-47.ELBOOT) if I want to use the
Broadcom NIC for a network install. Then I would need to add the new driver
to the initrd image, or make it available as a driver disk. When I look
inside the initrd image, the tg3.o driver is definitely not identical to the
tg3.o driver from the CD install, although that doesn't prove that the tg3
driver available during kickstart is incompatible with my hardware. 

 

Does it seem likely that RHEL3 U8 would contain a compatible driver for the
Broadcom NIC for the 2.4.21-47.EL kernel, but that the driver for the boot
kernel is not compatible? That seemed odd to me, so I thought I would ask
the question before proceeding with building the driver from source,
somewhat unfamiliar territory for me (especially building for boot kernels).
Or might there be another cause to this problem? 

 

Thanks,

 

Doug

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