Intel I219LM support on RHEL 6
Hi!
Is there a way to obtain a install image of RHEL 6 that have built in support for the Intel I219LM card?
Responses
As far as I can see, this device is covered by the e1000e driver which has been around for many years.
The latest RHEL 6 kernel appears to have support for the device:
$ egrep -RHni 219.LM drivers/net/e1000e
drivers/net/e1000e/hw.h:90:#define E1000_DEV_ID_PCH_SPT_I219_LM 0x156F /* SPT PCH */
drivers/net/e1000e/hw.h:92:#define E1000_DEV_ID_PCH_SPT_I219_LM2 0x15B7 /* SPT-H PCH */
drivers/net/e1000e/netdev.c:7244: { PCI_VDEVICE(INTEL, E1000_DEV_ID_PCH_SPT_I219_LM), board_pch_spt },
drivers/net/e1000e/netdev.c:7246: { PCI_VDEVICE(INTEL, E1000_DEV_ID_PCH_SPT_I219_LM2), board_pch_spt },
I'm running into this issue myself on RHEL 6.9. Currently running kernel version 2.6.32-696.1.1, which the downloads section claim is the latest version. When searching for the driver in egrep it comes up with "egrep: drivers/net/e1000: No such file or directory."
If anyone else is dealing with this, we're trying to run this on Dell Precision Tower 3650s.
Edit: I did find it elsewhere and is present using the following command:
grep -i 8086 /lib/modules/2.6.32-696.1.1.el6.x86_64/modules.* | grep -i 15b7
The output:
/lib/modules/2.6.32-696.1.1.el6.x86_64/modules.alias pci:v00008086d000015B7sv*sd*bc*sc*i* e1000e
/lib/modules/2.6.32-696.1.1.el6.x86_64/modules.pcimap:e1000e 0x00008086 0x000015b7 0xffffffff 0xffffffff 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x0
It does not show up in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf either. Not sure why the driver is not picking up the device.
Yes, 2.6.32-696.1.1 is the latest kernel at the moment.
The drivers/net/e1000e/* files I showed are the kernel source. You'll need to download a the kernel SRPM and prep it with rpmbuild if you wish to read the source: https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/I_need_the_Kernel_Source but that's not required for this.
With the grep above you've checked the driver present on the system does support the I219 LM2 devices, as it should.
What's the PCI ID of the NIC you're using? You can tell with lspci -nn | egrep Ether
Here's mine which shows PCI ID 8086:1503. The first part is Intel's vendor number, the second part is the device type, though you'll probably have a different device ID than I do:
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82579V Gigabit Network Connection [8086:1503]
If you don't see the NIC appear at all, then the system has some different issue. A common thing with old Dell BIOSes was the need to add pci=bfsort to the kernel boot line in GRUB, which changes the kernel's device detection. You might also need to mess around with some BIOS settings to get the device to detect.
If you do see the NIC appear with 8086:156f or 8086:15b7 then you do have an I219 but there could be some problem when the driver loads, check the output of dmesg to look for errors.
It doesn't appear to provide the NIC I'm looking for, but the add-on one (which also does not work). Looking through dmesg and messages, I noticed the following error kept coming up on the tail end.
[Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged
I guess I should also mention that these are Skylake chipsets.
It does, however, detect my other add-in NIC that I've installed for testing to see if it was chipset related or not, and it detects my Intel PRO/100 NIC, loads the driver, etc etc.
Edit: I also found the following in boot.log
/etc/rc5.d/S80postfix: line 34: /etc/sysconfig/network: No such file or directory
/etc/rc5.d/S80postfix: line 73: [: =: unary operator expected
EDIT: I found what the issue was. Internal NIC was not enabled. Dell has a confusing BIOS option where it has a checkbox for UEFI Network Stack and below it, Disable, Enable and Enable w/PXE. I figured the 3 options below were for UEFI Network Stack and disabled it, which is why it was not showing up as a hardware device.
So for anyone else reading this, check your BIOS options.
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