Re: [SSI-users] Upcoming 1.0.0-rc6 release

[Brian J. W. <Bri...@hp...>]

Thorn Roby wrote:
> Would it be possible to include the current Intel Gigabit Ethernet e1000 
>  driver from Sourceforge instead of the version shipped with RH9? The 
> older version doesn't recognize the current production models of the 
> card (I'm guessing there's a PNP vendor model ID mismatch). This makes 
> it difficult to bring up systems using this card, as the primary node 
> won't boot if it can't bring up the interconnect interface, so it's 
> impossible to build the driver with the correct SSI kernel running.

It doesn't seem to be available as a patch against the kernel, so it's 
not easy to work into our mostly automated release procedure. Arguably, 
Chirag or I could do a little extra work to build this driver for you, 
but this is not the only request we've gotten to build a driver that Red 
Hat doesn't include by default.

As an alternative, someone in the community could contribute to the 
OpenSSI project by building these network drivers for each release, and 
Chirag or I will make them available for download on OpenSSI.org. This 
would solve problems with unsupported NICs, without adding to the 
workloads of the current developers.

If someone is interested in doing this, I don't think you need the NICs 
to build any of these drivers. You just need a minimum of one node 
that's booted into the latest OpenSSI kernel. Building RPMs is 
preferable, but a .o file would probably also be fine.

Regards,

Brian