[elrepo] More 7.4 incompatible drivers

[Phil Perry]

On 06/10/17 13:45, Nick Howitt wrote:
> Hi Phil,
> 
> One thing I noticed in the summer last year but did not isolate at all 
> was that when I was running both the r8168 and r8169 drivers in a box 
> which had both cards, the 8169 NIC would not come up on boot and had to 
> be modprobed after boot. I got round it by:
> 

That may be because our kmod-r8168 blacklists the r8169 driver from 
loading and binding the device (see below).

> echo "modprobe r8169" > /etc/sysconfig/modules/r8169.modules
> chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/modules/r8169.modules
>  > This got the driver to load much earlier in the boot sequence.
> 
> The person who tested the via-rhine driver found the same here: 
> https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/clearos-7-4-beta#reply-190651 
> (and the following post) with drivers compiled for 7.4.
> 

What does lsinitrd say for the kernel in question? Are the appropriate 
drivers present in the initramfs?

IIRC, the issue with r8168/9 is complicated by the fact that the distro 
kernel r8169 driver is a unified driver that supports some hardware also 
supported by the kmod-r8168 driver, so the two are not designed to be 
used together as they may compete to bind the same device on boot.

My network config/admin skills are not great. Maybe there is a way to 
designate/bind a specific driver to a device to ensure you get the 
expected behaviour?