Realtek 8169 PCI Gigabit Ethernet disappears in 2.6.33 deblob?

[Dmitry Samoyloff]

At Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:59:31 +0200,
wayne  wrote:
> > Hello Wayne,
> > 
> > It seems to me like your Gentoo kernel is not deblobbed correctly, just like
> > gentoo-sources-2.6.34-r1 for me with deblob-2.6.34 script. Instead of removing
> > the Realtek's blob, it removes the whole source file. If you download the
> > deblobbed Linux from [1], you'd probably get your Realtek chip working. My
> > ethernet works OK with the deblobbed driver:
> > 
> > # lspci | grep -i realtek 
> > 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)
> 
> ahoy Dmitry,
> 
> 	thanks for the response.  actually, even though the device is not
> working, it is showing up in lspci output.  i am not sure if this means
> that drive is loaded, but some other problem is causing it not to work,
> or only that the kernel recognizes the hardware.

To check if the driver is present on your system at all, try modprobe -l:

  # modprobe -l r8169 
  /lib/modules/2.6.34-libre/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko

To check if it's loaded, check the lsmod output:

  # lsmod | grep r8169 
  r8169                  25460  0 
  mii                     2960  1 r8169

I've got the foregoing output in Gentoo with the vanilla Linux from FSFLA
server. When I tried to build gentoo-sources with "deblob" USE flag turned on,
the driver wasn't built at all. AFAIR there were error messages from the
deblobbing script also.

> PS.  is this a bug that we should submit somewhere in FSFLA?  or it is a
> problem with the Gentoo deblob USE flag?

I think this behavior should be reported to the Gentoo Linux-libre
maintainers.

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