TG3 or BCM5700 for BL20P?

[LEONG Tiang Wah]

I got a few Blade 20P running Redhat ES 2.1. Its new kernel, 2.4.9-e.41smp, couldn't recognise bcm5700 network interface
when boot up. But Redhat claims that they only support TG3 but not bcm5700.

The new kernel is able to boot up using TG3. However, there is a warning message complain about TG3 by cmanic,

Jul 6 14:32:28 xxxxxx cmanic: Unsupported tg3 driver loaded, please use
the tested and supported bcm5700

[Pascal Eberhard]

Hi,
I assume that the Support Pack has been installed (cmanic is the Linux Network Agent).
I assume as well that you made an upgrade of you Linux kernel.
Since then, the network module is now tg3 rather than bcm5700 (use 'lsmod' to check).

If it is the case the next information should interest you. If not, could you explain a little bit more your problem and your configuration? (what has been installed, in which order, ...).

tg3 is the default network drivers for Broadcom cards provided with RedHat distributions.
bcm5700 is the actual HP certified and supported network drivers for Broadcom cards.
So you should install the bcm5700 one.

A module (like the network driver) is working only for a specific kernel. When you are installing a new kernel, you have to recompile each additional module too (bcm5700, hpasm, ...).

The easiest way to do this is to launch the installation of the Support Pack again. It will rebuild all the HP modules against the new kernel and add them into the initrd image.