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NVIDIA nForce 3 Ethernet

At home, I'm using those little black Shuttle SN85G4 systems. One as my desktop and one as a MythTV project under way, which has to be ready by the time the soccer championship hits us in June. These Shuttles are running AMD64 (socket 754, no Opteron's :-). They're small, pretty silent and because Shuttle is coming up with new stuff, you get them pretty cheap, if you're still able to find them.

This weekend I was installing Solaris 10 and stumbled on the nForce 3 chipset not being supported. Also no download available from NVIDIA (for Linux yes, not for Solaris). That gives you a system with no working NIC, and that's no good. Checking the HCL, they clearly took the "easy way out" by installing a separate PCI network card, by-passing the onboard NIC.

A little browsing brought me to Masa Murayama's website which brings a whole set of unusual and therefore so useful NIC drivers. Among those, one called "nfo" for the nForce chipset. Masa labels the driver alpha-code, but I've had no problems. If you're going to use this driver, here are some tips. The tarball contains the source, but also ready-to-go modules for i386 and amd64. You can try to build, but if possible, better don't. Forget about "make", jump straight to "make install". I'm saying this, because building with gcc needed a little hacking and compiling with Studio 11 wasn't successful at all.

Next, follow his README carefully. It includes an "install", then an "uninstall" and then again an "install". This sounds weird, but if you follow it strictly, it all works. If you try to make shortcuts, like I did :-), you better know what you're doing, I didn't :-).

I stumbled on one problem. Part of the install is running a script called "adddrv.sh". In my case that gave a message about a library already being installed. I took that as a warning, but it really was an error. You have to solve that (by commenting out a line in the script, in my case two lines) before you can continue. If you ignore it, you're in trouble, it won't work.

When I later emailed about this with Masa Murayama, he mentioned that the likely cause was an nForce GbE driver recently added to Solaris. I guess he is right about that, but for me he is "1 - 0" ahead of the game (we're back to soccer here :), because the standard install didn't give me any networking at all and his "nfo" driver is doing fine.

Posted at 11:52AM May 09, 2006 by WWWillem in Desktop  |