Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet driver for Debian
Friday, July 20th, 2007
I just got a new ASUS M2V motherboard to replace a braindead server that would lock up on POST about 75% of the time. The new motherboard has a built-in Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter that is supported in Linux >= 2.6.21, but its driver is still missing from the daily Debian netinst CDs.
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device [1043:8226]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 25
Memory at fbcc0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
Expansion ROM at fbca0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [48] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
Capabilities: [58] Express Endpoint IRQ 0
Capabilities: [6c] Vital Product Data
I tried David Johnson’s pre-compiled driver for AMD64 but it didn’t work right away, so I compiled AtL1Linux_v1.0.41.0 for the stock 2.6.18-4-486 kernel in the official Debian 4.0 netinst CD and tested it. Although it was supposed to work right out of the box I kept getting “invalid module format” messages. So I stripped out the version information with
and it worked immediately. I completed the installation and I will upgrade the server to 2.6.21-2-amd64 over the weekend. So here is a atl1.ko for 2.6.18-4-486 that should work just fine.
By the way, I stripped the version information off David’s atl1.ko but I didn’t get a chance to test it because I was in a hurry. Here it is anyway in case someone finds it useful: atl1.ko for 2.6.18-4-amd64.
Oh, by the way, the M2V has four PCI slots but no built-in VGA adapter, and most PCI-e video cards are so thick that the first slot becomes unusable. Since I bought this motherboard precisely to maximize the number of available PCI slots in the server… well, it just sucks.
I tought this was just a 
