Suse 9.0 x86_64 and Asus SK8N

[Kevin D. Kissell]

I've got a shiny new Asus SK8N motherboard with a 2GHz Opteron processor.
It's running Windows 2000 nicely on its primay boot partition, but I did
want to
try installing the 64-bit-capable Linux that SuSE has made available. I
downloaded
and burned the boot CD image, and it boots up fine, but it doesn't see the
NIC.
The Asus web site provides driver downloads for Linux, and one can see that
it's the RTL8139, aka "8139too" driver is what they recommend. The SuSE
boot CD does offer that driver module as an option to manually load, so I've
tried loading it (as well as the other two 8139 variants which are
included).
The loading of the associated MII module succeeds, but the load of the
driver
module itself always fails. It *looks* like a generic driver module load
failure
message that is generated as a pop-up-and-vanish teal blue monologue box,
but it disappears too quickly for me to be sure. I am then given a red
failure
notice dialogue box - game over. There is an opportunity to provide some
load-time parameters to the driver module, and from searching the web here
and there, I came up with some to try, such as "irq=XXX io=YYYY", where
I've taken the information from the Windows 2000 hardware manager, but
nothing has worked, and in any case, supposedly one is to leave the field
blank.

Has anyone out there had any success in loading SuSE 9.0 for x86-64 from
off the net? Note that one cannot download CD images for a full install of
SuSE 9.0 - the only free path is via a networked install.

 

[Pete Bradbury]

Hi Kevin
I am in a similar position to you but mine is a shiny new AMD64-fx51 with
Asus sk8n.
However my system doesn't recognise the striped raid array set up with my XP
pro.
Promise appear to be working on this but so far I haven't seen any drivers.
I don't know if the onboard NIC (Network Interface Card) has been recognised
by SuSE but I do know
it works fine under XP.

Keep in touch - I'd like to get this working.

 

[Kevin D. Kissell]

The Promise RAID controller is known to be an issue with
Linux installations, but fortunately one can simply disable it
in the BIOS setup. Of course, if that's where your primary
disks are, that could be a problem. I had no desire to use it
anyway, so I'd turned it off since the first installation.
The NIC is certainly there for Win2K, and if I note the
interrupt and I/O address used for it, and look in the system
data accumulated by the SuSE installer, I can see that that
the I/O address is recognized to exist. I just can't get a
driver module to load for it.

I managed to get the BIOS upgraded to 1.04 this morning.
That didn't change the NIC driver problem, but it *did*
finally let me configure 400MHz FSB for the Opteron 146.
If you do flash the upgrade, I suggest doing a full power-down
before re-booting, however. I rebooted directly afterwards,
and the system was unstable until I did a full power-cycle.
Now it seems to be just fine - in Win2K.

I'm pretty sure I can install some more-or-less contemporary
32-bit x86 Linux distribution like Red Hat 9, but I was rather
hoping to get the native 64-bit version running.

 

[Pete Bradbury]

The Promise RAID controller is known to be an issue with
Linux installations, but fortunately one can simply disable it
in the BIOS setup. Of course, if that's where your primary
disks are, that could be a problem. I had no desire to use it
anyway, so I'd turned it off since the first installation.
The NIC is certainly there for Win2K, and if I note the
interrupt and I/O address used for it, and look in the system
data accumulated by the SuSE installer, I can see that that
the I/O address is recognized to exist. I just can't get a
driver module to load for it.

I managed to get the BIOS upgraded to 1.04 this morning.
That didn't change the NIC driver problem, but it *did*
finally let me configure 400MHz FSB for the Opteron 146.
If you do flash the upgrade, I suggest doing a full power-down
before re-booting, however. I rebooted directly afterwards,
and the system was unstable until I did a full power-cycle.
Now it seems to be just fine - in Win2K.

I've noticed that problem/feature of power off rather than reboot too

I'm pretty sure I can install some more-or-less contemporary
32-bit x86 Linux distribution like Red Hat 9, but I was rather
hoping to get the native 64-bit version running.

I used the promise drivers for RH 9.0 and it seemed to go through the
installation fine.
But just like you I want a real 64bit os on this. I don't think I'll bother
with RH 9.0
as it seems to be fading away to become Fedora, and Fedora doesn't appear to
be anywhere
close to installing in a 64bit mode. I don't suppose an upgrade from a 32 to
a 64 bit os would be simple
so I think I'll steer clear of that.

SuSE is the choice for me although I've used RH since 6.1. Unfortunately my
box came with XP pro and the raid array
already set up and so I don't want to lose either. So I'll have to hang
around until Promise
sort out the SuSE drivers, which they say they are working on....

Your NIC problem seems odd, I know I seem to be asking a stupid question,
but are you sure you've got the correct driver?
Perhaps there is a clash between SuSE drivers and the Asus, have you tried a
fresh install or ensured there are no residual or temporary files hanging
about which your installations are moistakenly picking up?

I'm no Linux guru so this might not help at all...

Good luck, let me know if you get it sorted

 

[Kevin D. Kissell]

Your NIC problem seems odd, I know I seem to be asking a stupid question,
but are you sure you've got the correct driver?
Perhaps there is a clash between SuSE drivers and the Asus, have you tried a
fresh install or ensured there are no residual or temporary files hanging
about which your installations are moistakenly picking up?

I installed Red Hat 9 from CD's, and while it results in a minimally usable
installation, it doesn't find the network controller, and neither compiling
the module from the Asus web site nor using the 8139too module bundled
with RH9 seems to make any difference. I came across a post somewhere
where someone said that he'd had to turn off APIC and APM to get RH9
to work on the board. I tried turning off APIC, and it made no apparent
difference to Linux (it sure confused Win2K, though!).

 

[baskitcaise]

Kevin D. Kissell wrote:

I installed Red Hat 9 from CD's, and while it results in a minimally usable
installation, it doesn't find the network controller, and neither compiling
the module from the Asus web site nor using the 8139too module bundled
with RH9 seems to make any difference. I came across a post somewhere
where someone said that he'd had to turn off APIC and APM to get RH9
to work on the board. I tried turning off APIC, and it made no apparent
difference to Linux (it sure confused Win2K, though!).

try ACPI not APIC, just enter acpi=off at the grub boot screen, not saying
this will help but it does for some boards, you should leave APIC on.

Well known mistake between ACPI/APIC.

HTH

 

[Kevin D. Kissell]

Here's the deal. On the Asus web site, there is a download package
available in the support->downloads are for the SK8N with the heading
"LAN" and the description "Realtek RTL8100C Driver Version 4.51.505"
for various Unix and Linux platforms. The Linux ("Red Hat") version is
a modified version of the 8139too module. THIS IS NOT WHAT IS NEEDED.

Instead, you need to find the "nVidia Chipset (CK8) driver version x.xx for Red Hat, SuSE..."
which is listed as a "utility", but which is in fact a driver package. This contains source and
binary RPMs and Linux source diffs relative to the 2.4.20 kernel sources. There's a subtree
called "nvnet", which fortunately contains the full sources for a driver for the nForce 3 integrated
network controller. You need to do a "make install" of this subdirectory *after* any kernel
rebuilds are done, since a kernel/module rebuild will tend to "clean up" and wipe out the nVidia
driver. But the module builds correctly under both 2.4.20 and 2.4.23, and by golly it works.

Now, if only someone would be so cool as to build it for a x86-64 kernel,
such that it could be installed from a floppy during the bootup of the single-CD
download version of the AMD64 build of SuSE 9.0...