NFORCE install fails on SuSE 10

[angrypanda]

Hi,

I just noticed that there is a new driver for the Nforce chipset, and I have been having intermittent problems with the NIC on my Nforce4 mobo ever since I bought it. Ocassionally, the onboard NIC (not the Marvell gigabit) will completely lock up. The symptoms are that the link light will flip between UP and DOWN every 10 seconds or so. Only a hard reboot (complete power off) will fix it.

Hence my rush to get the new driver installed: I followed the instructions for SuSE 10, and got the following error message:

rpm -ivh nv-suse10-2.6.13-15.x86_64.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
pre
1:nv-suse10 ########################################### [100%]
post
FATAL: Could not open '/boot/System.map-2.6.13-15-smp': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `/boot/initrd-2.6.13-15-smp': No such file or directory

The contents of /boot are:
/boot # ls
. initrd-2.6.13-15.11-smp
.. lost+found
System.map-2.6.13-15.11-smp message
backup_mbr symvers-2.6.13-15.11-x86_64-smp.gz
boot vmlinux-2.6.13-15.11-smp.gz
config-2.6.13-15.11-smp vmlinuz
grub vmlinuz-2.6.13-15.11-smp
initrd

So my question is: how do I get the RPM to recognise that the installed kernel version is: 2.6.13-15.11-smp and NOT 2.6.13-15-smp, which seems to be hard coded into the file?

Cheers, Jon.

[netllama]

The RPM was built explicitly for the 2.6.13-15-smp kernel. If you're not using that kernel, then you need to compiled forcedeth from source.

Thanks,
Lonni

[pe1chl]

Binary kernel module distributions are useless for SuSE Linux.
They update their kernel every couple of weeks, and change the kernel revision with every change. The current kernel is the 11th minor update after the distribution was released...

The changes normally are minor patches to fix security problems, but the version number change makes all independently compiled modules fail.
(not only this one, but also the video driver, the vmware modules, etc)

[netllama]

That is understood, which is why the source to forcedeth was provided along with the RPM.

Thanks,
Lonni

[angrypanda]

Okay, I appreciate that SuSE updates their kernel to fix security and other flaws (hardly a crime in my eyes), but why couldn't the RPM take this into account (in the same way the NVidia graphics driver does) and compile the sources for you?

Why penalise Nforce mobo users by forcing them to get their hands dirty and compile the forcedeth/sata drivers themselves?

Cheers, Jon.

[netllama]

The expectation is that distributions will pick up the released source and integrate it into their kernel builds.

Thanks,
Lonni