Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: "Canek Peláez Valdés" <caneko@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] kernel 3.8 and external drivers
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:37:08
Message-Id: CADPrc81dcumyjHOE69S_VL7Pp4rh2Ec0dcH0nLokWbXy1zbLDA@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] kernel 3.8 and external drivers by Daniel Wagener
1 On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Daniel Wagener <stelf@×××.net> wrote:
2 > Hello,
3 >
4 > I ran into some trouble about an hour ago…
5 >
6 > My workstation has an onboard Realtek Ethernet which only works with the r8168 driver.
7 > Unfortunately, this driver is not in the kernel, but available to be compiled as a kernel module. (I guess because of som patents)
8 > That worked for quite some time, until i thought "hey, you got an hour of time, your workstation is still on 3.7.4, why don't you just upgrade it to 3.8.2?"
9 > So I did, only to find out that Linus and his friends changed the way drivers are initialized… (__devinit got unsupported for example)
10 >
11 > Of course, the guys who wrote that r8169 have not changed their code yet.
12 >
13 > tl;dr:
14 > My network is broken since 3.8.0.
15 >
16 > So for an immediate fix I am emerging 3.7.10 (since emerge --depclean deleted the Kernel source when it found the source fo 3.7.8 which got removed as soon as 3.8.2 was emerged…) to get it working again.
17 > For the long run im thinking of buying a PCI(e) card with Kernel support.
18 > Or maybe, if I find some time I will fix the driver myself.
19 >
20 > My question now is:
21 > Who should I talk to so something like this does not happen again?
22 > A certain gentoo dev, who could issue warnings on emerging kernels, something like excerpts from the changelog?
23 > Myself, because I missed what I described above?
24 > The devs of the r8169?
25 > Linus & co for breaking things?
26 > Myself bcause I forgot something else?
27 > Realtek?
28 > Or someone completely different?
29
30 Mmmh. What sources do you use? In vanilla-sources-3.8.2, there is a
31 r8169 driver:
32
33 ./drivers/net/ethernet/realtek/r8169.c
34
35 config R8169
36 tristate "Realtek 8169 gigabit ethernet support"
37
38 Say Y here if you have a Realtek 8169 PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter.
39
40 To compile this driver as a module, choose M here: the module
41 will be called r8169. This is recommended.
42
43 What is more, I'm using that driver. It works without a problem. Do
44 you use a different driver with the same name?
45
46 Regards.
47 --
48 Canek Peláez Valdés
49 Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
50 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] kernel 3.8 and external drivers Daniel Wagener <stelf@×××.net>