Dear experts,

I am looking at the ixgbe driver for the Intel x520 SFP+ network adapter in 
order to accomodate the necessary routines for the "network" package. It has 
worked since SL6.1 without problem.

I am looking at the driver file that comes with the latest kernel,
$  modinfo /usr/lib/modules/3.10.0-229.1.2.el7.x86_64/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/ixgbe/ixgbe.ko | grep version
version:        4.0.1-k-rh7.1
rhelversion:    7.1
srcversion:     1CFEC34DC017FBEDC0500B1
vermagic:       3.10.0-229.1.2.el7.x86_64 SMP mod_unload modversions

And I noticed that today, we have
  kmod-ixgbe-3.22.3-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64
  kmod-ixgbe-3.23.2-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64
  kmod-ixgbe-3.23.2-2.el7.elrepo.x86_64
available from "elrepo", whereas the last version from
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/files/ixgbe%20stable/
is 4.0.3 indeed. (However, 4.0.1 is not in that release list!)

Comparing to the 4.0.1 source code drawn from a 3.19 (!) kernel in the 
archives, there are significant differences with respect to what SL7 calls 
4.0.1-k-rh7.1. The usual patching algorithm does not fail, but the code 
compiles and does *not* load as a module, due to a missing function symbol 
reference (vxlan_get_rx_port). We trashed the test and went back to ixgbe 
3.22.

Is anybody reading this *and* can explain how and why SL7 chose to patch/fork 
4.0.1 for the SL7 kernel module ixgbe?

Cheers
 									Dirk