Arch Linux

yvelon

Member

Registered: 2021-09-13

Posts: 3

I219-LM Nework Card no appearing under "ip a"

I have a new Dell Latitude 5420 laptop equipped with an integrated I219-LM [8086:15fb] (rev 20) network card.

A few days ago, during the installation of Arch, it was detected and working; although the speed was extremely slow.
Since a couple of days,

ip a

does not show this card anymore.
However, it appears in

dmesg

:

doas dmesg | grep e1000e
[    1.834709] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver
[    1.834711] e1000e: Copyright(c) 1999 - 2015 Intel Corporation.
[    1.835316] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6: Interrupt Throttling Rate (ints/sec) set to dynamic conservative mode
[    2.251305] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6: The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid
[    2.298891] e1000e: probe of 0000:00:1f.6 failed with error -5

And the kernel is loading the e1000e driver:

lsmod| grep e1000e
e1000e                311296  0

I just booted an Alpine Linux image to test out hardware problems and it recognized the card; got an IP address and performed as slow as when it appeared under Arch Linux.

Besides having it listed in Arch, it there a solution to the speed problem?

solskog

Member

Registered: 2020-09-05

Posts: 429

Re: I219-LM Nework Card no appearing under "ip a"

[    2.251305] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6: The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid

It seems this problem has been around a long time. I googled and found this answer, maybe give it a try.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … o-b-laptop

yvelon

Member

Registered: 2021-09-13

Posts: 3

Re: I219-LM Nework Card no appearing under "ip a"

Thank you for your answer!

I am not even sure if I am doing this right.
I cloned the kernel repo from Linus (in fact, only the relevant folder) and installed the kernel headers.
Then, following https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ … dules.html I compiled the driver with

make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=$PWD

make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=$PWD modules_install

Follwing the guide you suggested (the accepted answer) at https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/299187 and https://superuser.com/questions/1104537 … 41#1106641
I unloaded and reloaded the driver

doas modprobe -r e1000e
doas modprobe e1000e
doas update-initramfs -u 

The last one failed, I guess because I am using rEFInd?

Was this the right way to proceed?
And also, how can I force the loading of the new driver?

solskog

Member

Registered: 2020-09-05

Posts: 429

Re: I219-LM Nework Card no appearing under "ip a"

According to this readme.txt from intel
https://downloadmirror.intel.com/15817/eng/readme.txt
The latest driver can be found on http://e1000.sourcforge.net.
And follow the ice-1.6.7.tar.gz README guide to compile and load the driver as an loadable module.

# pacman -S linux-headers base-devel

Last edited by solskog (2021-09-14 09:16:27)

yvelon

Member

Registered: 2021-09-13

Posts: 3

Re: I219-LM Nework Card no appearing under "ip a"

Thanks for your repply.

Before attempting this, I tried reinstalling Arch Linux.
To my surprise, the network card is detected by the ArchISO (it works slowly, but that is another issue).
Moreover, I noticed that my wifi card gets renamed to wlan0, but it does not happen with the ethernet card: it keeps its name as ensxxxx
Unfortunately, after the reinstallation process, it is no longer detected and I am back to the previous errors.

Do you have any idea of what might be going on here?

solskog

Member

Registered: 2020-09-05

Posts: 429

Re: I219-LM Nework Card no appearing under "ip a"

# modinfo e1000e
filename:
/lib/modules/5.14.2-arch1-2/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000e/e1000e.ko.zst
license:        GPL v2
description:    Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver
author:         Intel Corporation, <linux.nics@intel.com>
srcversion:     7B910BFCA63317F8C4BA784
..
filename:
/lib/modules/5.13.13-arch1-1/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000e/e1000e.ko.zst
license:        GPL v2
description:    Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver
author:         Intel Corporation, <linux.nics@intel.com>
srcversion:     9B21FB888F0E7AE2CB78046

As you can see different kernel version compiles with different driver source version. That could explains different behavior of the driver. Reinstallation will not likely fix your issue, since the latest driver version is not in the mainline kernel yet.
If the Warning "The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid" is still present on dmesg, the problem remains. Try with the loadable module and see if it works.
One other thing is update your BIOS.

Last edited by solskog (2021-09-15 02:53:47)