[elrepo] [EG20T] Support for RHEL5 planned?

[Phil Perry]

On 16/08/11 16:13, Gerhart, Bjoern wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: elrepo-bounces at lists.elrepo.org
>> [mailto:elrepo-bounces at lists.elrepo.org] On Behalf Of Phil Perry
>> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 8:23 PM
>
> Hi Phil,
>
> thanks for your quick reply!
>

You're welcome.

>> Do you know if Intel provides are driver
>> directly for this
>> NIC?
>
> No, it actually seems that Intel does not provide drivers for that NIC.
>

Yes, I had a look around the Intel site too and was unable to find 
anything :-(

> We already started backporting the pch_gbe module from 2.6.38 to the 2.6.18 CentOS 5 kernel, but are stuck right now. The code seems to require the mii module which in turn has changed also meanwhile.
> So I could provide this attempt as a code base for the backport. Do you have a separate GIT or Subversion server and maybe a guideline how to commit new (but buggy) code to the elrepo project?
>

We have a git repository here:

https://github.com/elrepo

Please feel free to clone the packages repo 
(https://github.com/elrepo/packages), add what you have and submit a 
pull request. There are some instructions in the README here:

https://github.com/elrepo/packages/blob/master/README.mkd

I had a quick look at the code too, and made some limited progress. I 
started with the source from kernel-2.6.39.3 (purely as I had a copy to 
hand) and started trying to build it on RHEL5. I managed to patch 
pch_gbe_ethtool.c, and all the other objects then build except for 
pch_gbe_main.c which had quite a few errors. That's about as far as I 
got before running out of time.

I could commit what I have to our git repo for us to work on.

I guess we really need to first decide which upstream kernel version to 
base our efforts on. Anyway, I'm happy to work together on this to try 
to backport the code.

BTW, were you aware that elrepo also provides mainline kernel packages 
for RHEL5, currently kernel-ml-2.6.39-4.el5.elrepo which should offer 
native support for your device:

http://elrepo.org/linux/kernel/el5/

Obviously these aren't ideal for production use but might offer an 
option should the backport prove not to be possible. Alan currently 
maintains these packages for elrepo.

Regards,

Phil