On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 7:08 AM, Dirk Hoffmann <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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?

SL's kernels are simply rebuilt from the upstream (RHEL) kernel
source. So, it was Red Hat to decide to update the igxbe driver to
4.0.1. I suspect it was backported from the latest stable kernel from
kernel.org (4.0).

ELRepo's source code comes from intel.com if I'm not mistaken. The
latest is still at 3.23.2.

Akemi