[64studio-devel] Problems with the Distro

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2006-10-13 at 12:02 -0500, Link Swanson wrote:
> I have been building dual-boot (CCRMA with XP) systems using Biostar
> T-Force 6100 boards with onboard nforce4 ethernet (forcedeth). It's all
> good until I install and use the nForce ethernet drivers from within
> Windows. After you boot back into Linux, the initialization of eth0 fails.
> I have not discovered a solution to this, but I messed with some SE Linux
> settings and fixed it for a few weeks, only to have it stump me all over
> again for no reason. I have had this problem on every nForce 4 onboard
> ethernet controller.
> 
> Please post the solution if you find it.

This might be related to a recent thread on LKML.  The problem is
something like: the driver sets the MAC of the ethernet device on bootup
using an address stored in the BIOS, but the MAC address stored in the
BIOS is byte-swapped on some nForce boards, so the driver has to correct
it.  IOW, hardware bug.

I believe it's fixed in 2.6.18.  Otherwise it could be a different
issue.

Lee