installing redhat8 over network

[K.C. Chan]

All,
The server which I am installing Redhat8 over the network has a Gigabit Broadcom NIC. It's failling to load the tg3 module and it drop me to a manual install page. Any idea if redhat 8 support the Broadcome NetXtreme card? Thanks.

[Stuart Browne]

RH8 only supports a few of the Broadcomm cards with the tg3 driver.

If it's a lower end box (i.e. not one of the ML/DL server range), then it probably requires either the 'bcm5700' or 'bcm4400' driver, which aren't on the install media or boot disks.

I had to manually create a new boot-disk for RH9 with these drivers included (was fun! really!).

[K.C. Chan]

Is there a way to specify which module to use via ksdevice? Thanks.

[Stuart Browne]

No, that noly says which interface card to use (so unless there's multiple cards in the machine).

You'll have to compile against the 2.4.18-xxBOOT kernel the bcm4400 drivers, and include this in the 'initrd.img' archive's 'modules.cgz'.

It takes a bit of fiddling, but can be done pretty quickly if you have a bit of patience.

There are instructions on how to include your own drivers in the initrd.img on the internet already, you just need to adapt these for the drivers you need.

As I said, I did this for RH9 recently.

[K.C. Chan]

stuart,
I am installing rh8 from CD on Friday, when it booted it failed to load the tg3 drivers. I went to broadcom site and downloaded the source for it, recompiled it and tested out the bcm5700 drivers, it works. I will proceed with your suggestion next week. You wouldn't happen to know where I can get an update for tg3 source driver, would you?

[Stuart Browne]

tg3 and bcm5700 don't support the same subset of network cards.

In any case, the tg3 drivers are up to about a version 2.2+ (1.0 comes with RH8), and it is written by a RH guy and a PObox.com guy. They don't have a separate page for their source.

You could try downloading the latest source code, and pulling the tg3.c and tg3.h from there.