For the past couple of days ive been playing with an msi6561 mobo (uses sis745 chipset) and have been unable to bring up the network to emerge rsync. Ive tried 3 different nics (8139too, tulip and sis900) in just about every slot combination with no luck. I tried booting the cd with the nonet option (loads a *lot* less kernel networking modules!) and modprobe sis900. ifconfig eth0 works ok but reports that im dropping packets after pinging another host. dmesg reports that networking really *is* there and the netdev watchdog reports xmit timeouts. Just for references sake, the 1.2 install cd works fine on this same mobo/nic combination.
OK, thanks for the info. FYI, I have a sis735 mobo that has the same nic issue. Try turning off apic -- "gentoo noapic" at the boot prompt -- and see if that helps. I'm ccing zwelch on this one, because he may have just had (and fixed) an identical issue.
i just tried the noapic noscsi nonet routes with both gentoo-grp-athlon-xp-1.4_rc2 and livecd-basic-x86-2003011400 ... still no luck :/
I actually had to recompile the kernel to exclude IO-APIC support for uniprocessors. SMP kernels seem to transparently include that functionality.
It would be interesting to hear the rationale for an smp kernel on the install disk, since on a multiple cpu machine a normal kernel will boot just fine, which I imagine, is ok for installation purposes. If there is no work-around for this, would it be possible to have a normal kernel back, please?
slowburnaz posted a solution involving booting from the 1.2 cd, getting networking running and then replacing it with the 1.4_rc2 cd on Sat Jan 18, 2003 5:40 pm in the "8139 problems with 1.4_rc2" thread under "Installing Gentoo" topic. Primitive, but effective :)))
if any confirmation is/was required for this issue: I mistakenly left the smp option on a kernel I built for this sis745 mobo machine and I got no network. A single cpu version of the same kernel boots fine.
The most recent livecds (for 1.4_rc4) have both single cpu and smp kernels, making this a moot issue, so ... i'm closing this bug.
Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux". I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers, this is the only reasonable way to do this.