r8169: instant reboot and interface renaming

r8169: instant reboot and interface renaming

[Xavier Bestel]

Hi,

I just replaced a fast ethernet card with a Realtek 8169 Gigabit
ethernet card on an old DELL Poweredge running debian. I upgraded the
kernel to 2.6.22 but it didn't solve my problems.

At boot, the kernel says:
r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.2LK-NAPI loaded
eth0: RTL8169s/8110s at 0xe0848400, 00:1b:2f:2b:b3:b4, IRQ 17

but then eth0 doesn't exist and is renamed to eth3. Does anybody know
why, and how to get it back to eth0 ? There's probably a FAQ on this
somewhere, but I couldn't find it.


The other problem I have is, as soon as I do
ifconfig eth3 up
the machine is rebooting (like if I pressed the reset button).
Adding "acpi=noirq" to the boot cmdline seems to solve this, but I
wonder if it's the proper solution ?


Thanks for your help,

	Xav

Re: r8169: instant reboot and interface renaming

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:43:51 +0200
Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr> wrote:



Hi,

> At boot, the kernel says:
> r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.2LK-NAPI loaded
> eth0: RTL8169s/8110s at 0xe0848400, 00:1b:2f:2b:b3:b4, IRQ 17
> 
> but then eth0 doesn't exist and is renamed to eth3. Does anybody know
> why, and how to get it back to eth0 ? There's probably a FAQ on this
> somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

this is userspace doing "eth name by MAC address", your new card has a
different MAC address than your old card, the userspace application
tries to bind each name uniquely to an ethX name so it keeps eth0 free
for your old card.

If you have a RH/Fedora like distribution, you can hack out the mac
address from the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file

> 
> 
> The other problem I have is, as soon as I do
> ifconfig eth3 up
> the machine is rebooting (like if I pressed the reset button).
> Adding "acpi=noirq" to the boot cmdline seems to solve this, but
> I wonder if it's the proper
> solution ?

it's obviously not the proper solution :)
it's odd though; it could entirely be a bios bug. you may want to file
a bug at bugzilla.kernel.org against the acpi component, and make sure
you include the full dmesg of a boot at least...

Greetings,
   Arjan van de Ven

Re: r8169: instant reboot and interface renaming

[Xavier Bestel]

On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 15:32 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> this is userspace doing "eth name by MAC address", your new card has a
> different MAC address than your old card, the userspace application
> tries to bind each name uniquely to an ethX name so it keeps eth0 free
> for your old card.
> 
> If you have a RH/Fedora like distribution, you can hack out the mac
> address from the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file

Thanks, that was it. For those who are interested, under debian
it's /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

> > The other problem I have is, as soon as I do
> > ifconfig eth3 up
> > the machine is rebooting (like if I pressed the reset button).
> > Adding "acpi=noirq" to the boot cmdline seems to solve this, but
> > I wonder if it's the proper
> > solution ?
> 
> it's obviously not the proper solution :)
> it's odd though; it could entirely be a bios bug. you may want to file
> a bug at bugzilla.kernel.org against the acpi component, and make sure
> you include the full dmesg of a boot at least...

OK, filed http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9007

Thanks,
	Xav