Mistake Correction GA311 NIC and Linux

[Steven E. Protter]

Though when I bought it I thought I saw Linux Drivers I now have 4 Netgear GA311 NIC cards which don't ship with Linux Drivers.

I have obtained Red Hat 7.X drivers for the GA621 Netgear NIC, in case it would be useful.

So here is the plan:
I'm doing to do a Linux Install with the latest and greatest Red Hat ES 3 disk. Thats going to take some time because the box I picked is supposed to be a gigantic disk array and I have 122 GB drives replicating at this time.

I'm hoping that Linux will pick up the card as 1000 BASET because the card is quite simlar to other Netgeard cards.

What I'm afraid is going to happen is it gets picked up as 100 BaseT. This disk array needs 1000 BaseT speeds to provide my little Enterprise with disk space.

So, I'll report back on Sunday as to how the cards detected.

Lets assume I need to write my own driver. Anyone already done that? Big points for that. If not, I'm wondering if I can use the GA621 driver as a base.

I'll 10 point a post that says all will be well, and I'll take cookbooks on how to do the driver and get it into a Red Hat Kernel.

Details required for a rabbit.

Yes, 10 smacks with a wet noodle for me blowing the purchase. I own the darn things and I don't want to have to install them in Windows Boxes. I simply don't have enough Windows boxes anyway.

SEP

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello SEP,

all I found about this is that they >>might<<
work with with the r8169 driver.

You will have to test this by yourself though.

HTH,

Martin

[Steven E. Protter]

Marin,

I'm going to need a wee bit more. How do I use that driver.

Until now I've always been a strict stay on the hardware list geek.

Feeling pretty stupid now.

SEP

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello SEP,

I do not have this particular HW, but there has been a (very brief) discussion on the Fedora mailing list about it at

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-February/msg01385.html

which lists this particular driver for your card.

Greetings, Martin

P.S. Be sure to read the follow-up post to that page too, the SMP problem reported in the first place seems to be moot.

[Steven E. Protter]

Bad news and more bad news.

Red Hat totally failed to see if there was a NIC at all.

This is pretty much a disaster.

Next step? Is there a way to write a driver?

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

Turns out the card that was cabled did detect as a r8169 driver card/driver.

Was able to bring it up with ifconfig no problem.

I'll award 10 points to someone that either finds an already written driver for this card for Linux or provides me a cookbook/recipe for doing this.

I've got it up at 100 BaseT and can survive a long time in that mode.

My parellel problem is that the rocketraid 133 card I chose for this project is certified Red Hat 9,not ES 3. Since ES 3 is based on 9 and I have network connectivity I can give the Red Hat 9 drivers a shot.

I suppose if it comes down to a choice between my NIC card and the raid card I'll defer to the Raid card since the ultimate purpose of this project is to provide centralized storage to my business' data center.

Regards,

SEP

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello SEP,

if I was adventurous enough to write a driver I would start most probably from

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxdrive2/

Greetings, Martin

[Steven E. Protter]

What is a NDIS Driver?

The card does seem to ship with an NDIS Driver. I've seen some discussion that use the words Linux and NDIS driver in the same sentence.

SEP

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello SEP,

not sure NDIS drivers will help. To quote

" NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification) is a Windows specification for how communication protocol programs (such as TCP/IP) and network device driver should communicate with each other."

There is some effort under way to make Windows NDIS drivers available via a wrapper to the Linux kernel.

For a free project check:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

It seems there is a more mature commercial offering at

http://www.linuxant.com/

While both sites talk mostly about WLAN cards
it might be of use for you too, but certainly there is some effort involved.

Greetings, Martin

[Steven E. Protter]

Pretty much I'm screwed.

I bought the wrong cards.

D-link has one for the same price thats certified for Linux.

My best bet is to use the netgeard cards in supporeted Windows machines and get supported cards from d-link.

Which is exactly what I'm going to do once d-link assures me the darned things are certified with the version of Linux I want to use.

How stupid can I be? I still thought I saw Linux support on Netgear's site. I'm sure at some point, maybe in the 2.6 kernel everything is going to be supported.

For now, I have to dig a little deeper into my pockets.

GRRRR!

SEP

[Stuart Browne]

Go frustration.. :) I can't say I've had this particular frustration though.

The latest one I've had is an automatic machine building CD based on RH 9, that I spent many hours getting to work (go kickstart, network installs, and 50MB of customizations all auto-built!).

The little darling works like a charmer.. Except the new machines we're using them on have the new broadcomm NIC's in them, of which RH9 doesn't support out of the box.. *sigh*..

Go compiling boot-kernel-modules and re-creating bootable CD's.. *whee!*

The rate of development that these network cards are going through is certainly making it difficult to get stable-release software working with them, without having to make heavy customisations to established procedures.

Ah well! Time for me to burn a few coasters!

[Stuart Browne]

(Continuing off-topic) .. after about 2 hours concentrated effort, and 4 CD-Coaster's later, I finally did it (damn recompiling kernel on a slow-ass celeron 400Mhz!).

The amount of little things to get right.. *sighs* modules.dep, module-info, and pcitable. Of course, it helps having working reference machines ... of which I have none ..

It hurt, being reminded how bad my C skills are, browsing through that driver code.. But VendorID and SubID's were found *whee!* All working again!

Go Funky CD! :))

*dances off kinda funny-happy-like!*

[Robert Binkhorst]

SEP,

This is card comes with RedHat driver upto and including version 7.1. You can compile them yourself, so you might be in luck.

Overview page:
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/GA621.php?view=

Download the drivers v2.0 here:
http://kbserver.netgear.com/support_details.asp?dnldID=139

HTH,

Robert

[Steven E. Protter]

dlink has a card for $30 taht says it supports kernel 2.4.18 and above.

I've contacted them for specfic information on Red Hat ES 3.

The GA621 card costs $200 and is not supported on Red Hat ES 3.

Netgears website says:

"Supported on all Major Operating systems" for the GA311

Then it fails to list Linux.

Linux people, penguin heads, be OFFENDED!

Stuart, I'm assuming you've not written the driver I need. * sigh *

SEP

[Stuart Browne]

Err, no. Sorry. Was going off on my own tangent..

It's scary, Google searches for GA311 and Linux show this thread more than once. Have to be somewhat impressed by that ;)

[Steven E. Protter]

Hi Stuart,

I am quite impressed by that. If we can get a driver into this thread, that will be REALLY impressive.

SEP

[Mattias Aspman]

Hi All.
Well i found it thruu the google search. =))

But anyway. I am, as you searching for a driver for this (GA311) cards Linux drivers.
I hope that you all, as i do. Are hammering netgear to produce a linux driver for this card ASAP. Its quite irretating that they have produced the driver for as low as Win-ME/98SE. And not for a platform as Linux.
Get a grip netgear...

Good luck in making your own working driver.
I hope we all see this card up and running in Gbit on Linux.

[Mattias Aspman]

http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/

Might help. =))

[Steven E. Protter]

Look at the current technology story, written by me here: http://www.investmenttool.com

I've emailed netgear asking for a response. Thus far they've issued and automatated reply.

They are quite clueless.

sEP

[Robert Vecchiolli]

SEP-
I just got myself a pair of those GA311 NICs as well. Unfortunately, I didn't check to make sure that the cards were supported before I bought them. After searching the net (e.g. googling several queries) I came to the conclusion that the card was indirectly supported by the kernel drivers. I figured this much out by inspecting the chip on the NIC and finding that Netgear used the Realtek RTL8169s chip to make their cards. So, I just dropped it into my server and it detected and inserted the correct drivers for me. It even auto-negotiated a 1000Mb connection with my switch. I'm using Mandrake 10 though, and the Linux Kernel version with the distro is 2.6.3.

So, my senario isn't exactly like yours, but in my searchings I came across this page:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0404.3/0002.html
In that thread the person (Andy Lutomirski) mentions a tool called ethtool and he gives the command 'ethtool -s ethx autoneg on' to make his gigabit card auto-negotiate the connection speed after the system has completely booted. Which, from reading your posts, seems like would work for you, given that your cards were detected by the kernel at boot up and the RTL8169s drivers (module r8169) inserted themselves only you're getting 100Mb instead of 1000Mb. I'm thinking that ethtools might help you out in getting the NIC to renegotiate for 1000Mb.

HTH

-RLV