[KLUG Members] Re: SiS900 in SiS735 chipset on ECS K7S5A, RedHat Rawhide kernel -- WAS: Experiences so far...

[Bryan-TheBS-Smith]

Craig Davis wrote:
> hmm, fighting that very same NIC issue.  I'll let you know if I
> get it working....

Oh, that reminds me.  I forgot to mention I tried to see if the SiS900
NIC in my SiS735 chipset on my ECS K7S5A mainboard worked with a newer
kernel.  From my last post, I mentioned that sometime after the 2.4.3
kernels the drivers stopped working.  It seems to be limited to the
SiS900.c drivers newer than 1.07.08 or 1.07.09 (Jan/Feb 2001
timeframe).  From what I've learned elsewhere, there seem to be a lot of
changes in even _source_ compatibility in different kernel 2.4.x release
that have required many drivers be updated (which is something I never
saw before in 1.0.x thru 2.2.x).

Well, I grabbed both the stock 2.4.17 kernel as well as RedHat's
2.4.16-0.13 kernel from Rawhide.  Neither worked for the NIC.  The
driver loaded, but it always had some IOCTL or other failure -- many
times very silently, taking an IP address, but just flat out failing to
transmit any type of packet.

The 2.4.16-0.13 Rawhide kernel is actually a 2.4.17 pre-release
(EXTRAVERSIONS=rc1).  I had to rebuild it because RedHat's Rawhide is
now using GCC 3.02/3.1 to compile newer Rawhide packages in preparation
for RedHat 8.0.  Rebuilding for GCC 2.96 is not an issue and requires no
changes (GCC 2.96 and 3.0 are pretty much in-line at the ABI level,
because 2.96 was the 3.0 pre-release).  Don't download the newer
modutils, as specified in the dependency for the Rawhide kernel as
you'll be chasing your tail on the GCC 3.0.x issue.  Just rebuild from
source RPM (.src.rpm).

BTW, I think it's time that RPM (as well as Deb) adopt an extra field or
two for GCC and/or GLibC dependencies.  It would solve a lot of issues
IMHO.  But that's another story I don't want to go into.

-- TheBS

CC:  KLUG

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Bryan "TheBS" Smith     mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org    chat:thebs413
Engineer   AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.   http://www.linux-wlan.org
President     SmithConcepts, Inc.     http://www.SmithConcepts.com
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