Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@××××××××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] kernel 3.8 and external drivers
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:50:20
Message-Id: 513E1943.1020502@googlemail.com
1 Am 11.03.2013 00:05, schrieb Daniel Wagener:
2 > On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:53:42 +0100
3 > Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@××××××××××.com> wrote:
4 >
5 >> Am 10.03.2013 19:28, schrieb Daniel Wagener:
6 >>> Hello,
7 >>>
8 >>> I ran into some trouble about an hour ago…
9 >>>
10 >>> My workstation has an onboard Realtek Ethernet which only works
11 >>> with the r8168 driver. Unfortunately, this driver is not in the
12 >>> kernel, but available to be compiled as a kernel module. (I guess
13 >>> because of som patents) That worked for quite some time, until i
14 >>> thought "hey, you got an hour of time, your workstation is still on
15 >>> 3.7.4, why don't you just upgrade it to 3.8.2?" So I did, only to
16 >>> find out that Linus and his friends changed the way drivers are
17 >>> initialized… (__devinit got unsupported for example)
18 >>>
19 >>> Of course, the guys who wrote that r8169 have not changed their
20 >>> code yet.
21 >>>
22 >>> tl;dr:
23 >>> My network is broken since 3.8.0.
24 >>>
25 >>> So for an immediate fix I am emerging 3.7.10 (since emerge
26 >>> --depclean deleted the Kernel source when it found the source fo
27 >>> 3.7.8 which got removed as soon as 3.8.2 was emerged…) to get it
28 >>> working again. For the long run im thinking of buying a PCI(e) card
29 >>> with Kernel support. Or maybe, if I find some time I will fix the
30 >>> driver myself.
31 >>>
32 >>> My question now is:
33 >>> Who should I talk to so something like this does not happen again?
34 >>> A certain gentoo dev, who could issue warnings on emerging kernels,
35 >>> something like excerpts from the changelog? Myself, because I
36 >>> missed what I described above? The devs of the r8169?
37 >>> Linus & co for breaking things?
38 >>> Myself bcause I forgot something else?
39 >>> Realtek?
40 >>> Or someone completely different?
41 >>>
42 >> so, you are using a superfluous external driver. Despite the fact that
43 >> external drivers are prone to breaking you insist on using the latest
44 >> kernel, instead using the latest kernel of one of the stable kernel
45 >> series like 3.4. To add insult to injury you remove kernels after
46 >> installing instead of after testing.
47 > well… I guess that sums it up… :(
48 >
49 I hope so. But not all is lost. You learnt a lesson, next time someone
50 does something like that you can act like the resident asshole and I get
51 a couple of minutes off. Everybody wins. Especially me.