Nvidia NFORCE NIC and Opensolaris 2009.06

When I first started up Opensolaris I noticed that the internal motherboard NIC didn't work and went out in search of a solution. Here is a culmination of my findings in a solution that worked for me.


Verify you have an Nforce chipset based NIC:


“/usr/X11R6/bin/scanpci -v”
pci bus 0×0000 cardnum 0×0f function 0×00: vendor 0×10de device 0×07dc
nVidia Corporation MCP73 Ethernet
CardVendor 0×1043 card 0×816a (ASUSTeK Computer Inc., Card unknown) STATUS 0×00b0 COMMAND 0×0007 CLASS 0×02 0×00 0×00 REVISION 0xa2 BIST 0×00 HEADER 0×00 LATENCY 0×00 CACHE 0×00
BASE0 0xefffd000 SIZE 4096 MEM
BASE1 0×0000f600 SIZE 8 I/O
BASE2 0xefffc000 SIZE 256 MEM
BASE3 0xefffb000 SIZE 16 MEM
BASEROM 0×00000000 addr 0×00000000
MAX_LAT 0×14 MIN_GNT 0×01 INT_PIN 0×01 INT_LINE 0×0f


It’s there so it must need a hardware driver to function.


After Google searching a bit I found the following driver:


http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/nfo-2.6.3.tar.gz


The steps straight outta the README


1. gunzip nfo-2.6.3.tar.gz
2. tar -xvf nfo-2.6.3.tar
3. cd nfo-2.6.3
4. rm obj Makefile
5. ln -s Makefile.${KARCH}_${COMPILER} Makefile ( for me it was ln -s Makefile.amd64_gcc Makefile )
6. ln -s ${KARCH} obj ( for me it was ln -s amd64 obj )
7. rm Makefile.config
8. ln -s Makefile.config_gld3 Makefile.config
9. /usr/ccs/bin/make
10. /usr/ccs/bin/make install
11. cp nfo.conf /kernel/drv/nfo.conf
12. ./adddrv.sh (I had to reboot here and resume at the following steps, YMMV)
13. modload obj/nfo
14. devfsadm -i nfo
15. ifconfig nfoN plumb ( where N is the device number, for me it was nfo0 )
16. ifconfig nfo0 dhcp start ( this is if you want your interface to use DHCP )
17. touch /etc/dhcp.nfo0 ( this is if you want your interface to use dhcp when it come back up)
18. edit /etc/nsswitch.conf ( Where it says host: files, change it to host: files dns )
19. reboot —r


All is well now.