There's apparently a nasty bug in the implementation of the kernel module net/3c59x in kernel series 2.4.20. LiveCD is affected, so is RedHat 8.1b and most certainly any distribution using this kernel (I suspect Gentoo emerged kernels do as well). This problem affects 3c556B cards making the kernel unable to detect the network card transceiver. I haven't been able to try it out but I believe the newest version of the 3c59x module (which can be found at ftp://ftp.scyld.com/pub/network/test/3c59x.c) fixes this issue. Other network cards may be affected by this bug as well but I don't really think so. The symptoms while in the LiveCD are: ifconfig eth0 up gives a bunch of errors like: eth0: command 0x5800 did not complete! Status=0xffff eth0: command 0x2804 did not complete! Status=0xffff eth0: command 0x3002 did not complete! Status=0xffff eth0: command 0x3002 did not complete! Status=0xffff and so on ifconfig eth0 after that displays the MAC address as FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF Note that this problem did not occur with Gentoo 1.2 nor with RedHat 8.0 which uses kernel 2.4.18 It's not a gentoo-specific issue but I believe the problem can be fixed in the LiveCD and emerged kernel to make Gentoo ahead of the competition ;)
http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/index-cvs.xml This shows a "fix for 3c59x again" Does this apply to LiveCD as well or just the gentoo kernel ? Also, does it fix this specific issue ? Is there a way to access the diffs in the CVS repository for gentoo users like some kind of web interface or anonymous CVS access ? Thanks.
Ive fixed this driver 10x :), it always messes up somewhere different.. The url you posted is a newer driver, but it doesnt get along with current acpi. gs-sources contains some fixes from the Marcelo bitkeeper tree, but no idea if they fix your problem. There are no diffs on cvs, they are all in one tarball for each kernel. ie: gs-sources-2.4.21_pre3-r2 = linux-2.4.20 + patches-2.4.21_pre3-r2.tar.bz2 on ibiblio The only livecds that have any fixes at all are the experimentals.
Fixed in latest experimental LiveCD. Good work :)
fixed
db fix
