4.8-RELEASE: Gigabit Ethernet support on Dell PowerEdge 1750

[Konrad Heuer]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Andrew Cleland wrote:

> I'm trying and failing to get 4.8-RELEASE to recognise the two Broadcom
> 5704C based NICs on a Dell PowerEdge 1750 server.
>
> I've recompiled the kernel with 'device miibus' and 'device bge' with no
> problems, and the system boots OK, but the two NICs appear as
> unrecognised devices when booting, and no sign of them appearing as
> network interfaces...
>
> >From googling around it looks like they work fine with 5.1, but I don't
> really want to run 5.1 on a production server yet.

I've three DELL PE 2650 running with 4.8-R; the Broadcom cards work fine.
While booting, the kernel reports:

bge0: Ethernet address: 00:10:18:02:43:07
miibus0: <MII bus> on bge0
brgphy0: <BCM5701 10/100/1000baseTX PHY> on miibus0
brgphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseTX,
1000baseTX-FDX, auto

The kernel config file contains nothing but

# PCI Ethernet NICs that use the common MII bus controller code.
# NOTE: Be sure to keep the 'device miibus' line in order to use these
NICs!
device          miibus          # MII bus support
device          bge             # Broadcom BCM570x (``Tigon III'')

regarding the NICs.

Are you sure the NICs aren't disabled in the BIOS setup? Sorry for using
the word 'Linux', but I'm not fanatic. Maybe you could try to boot a Linux
kernel from CD (Knoppix or so?) and watch what happens?

Regards

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