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Rebuilding the Alteon Acenic Firmware


The acenic firmware now resides in a cvs archive on jemez.cs.unm.edu. This document assumes that you have set up cvs to access that archive. Please see the cvs basics document for more information.

Currently we are using version 2.2.12 and 2.2.14 of the kernel, although any 2.2.x or 2.4.0-pre-x version will probably work. With module versioning, you will probably only be able to 'insmod' the modules for the currently running version of the kernel.

Assuming that the firmware archive is in ~/acenic and the kernel is in /usr/src/linux:

cd ~/acenic/nic/fw2/common
make
(you may need to become root at this point)
cd /usr/src/linux/drivers/net
emacs (or vi) acenic_firmware.h
Find the three lines:
int tigon2FwReleaseMajor = 0xc;
int tigon2FwReleaseMinor = 0x3;
int tigon2FwReleaseFix = 0xa;
and leave them in place but delete everything from there to the end of the file. Then insert the contents of ~/acenic/nic/fw2/common/alt_fw2.h into the file, and save. Then:
cd /usr/src/linux
make modules
cd drivers/net
insmod ./acenic.o
Assuming that the interface you are configuring is eth2 (it probably will be on the Vista Azul cluster--on other machines, type 'ifconfig' to see what interfaces already exist), you can now configure that interface:
ifconfig eth2 192.168.2.1 up
If you need to remove the module, simply do:
ifconfig eth2 down
rmmod acenic
And you can start all over!