Hi there!
Not sure if this is the right place for development questions, but it's probably a good start.
I have several 1GB nics based on the Alteon Tigon II (DEC DEGPA-TA and Netgear GA630), and want to use them in my Proliant ML330 G3 running VMware ESXi 3.5u5. They're great cards where they're supported.
I know this card isn't supported in ESX/ESXi, so I compiled the Linux acenic driver from the 2.4 kernel using the build environment from the VMware-eesx-public-source-3.5.0-153875.tar.gz. (the newer one doesn't work so well...) Anyway, the acenic.o module compiled beautifully. All I had to do was add a directory for it, add a linux_module_heap.c, and protect the function call to net_ratelimit() in acenic.c with "#ifndef __VMKERNEL_MODULE__"... This is all under RHEL3. I copied-and-pasted the build commands from the tg3.o module and edited to suit. Only the path names and .c file needed to be changed.
I put together an tarball acenic.tgz with the freshly-compiled acenic.o and a modified simple.map with the PCI ids of all cards supported by the acenic driver, and added it to the list of modules to load in boot.cfg. Amazingly, it sort-of works! With the new module in place, lspci shows the card, and it has at the end of the output line for the card:
lspci
...
00:07.00 Network controller: Netgear GA630
...
#
Indeed, /var/log/config.log and /var/log/messages (attached) both show that the acenic.o gets loaded successfully, and that firmware gets loaded into the card. When I connect the NIC to the network, I even get a message indicating that vmnic1 is up. Unfortunately, it doesn't show up in the VI Client, nor in the output of esxcfg-nics -l.
Is there some additional step that must be taken in order to get the card usable? Would someone be kind enough to point me in the right direction for getting this working?
I know this is completely unsupported, etc. This is for home, so if it gets messed up, oh well 
Many, many thanks in advance!!
Hello,
I take it there isn't much work on making other cards available?
Umm.. it is not always that easy that you can get away with just a few lines of code. Sometimes you can, sometimes not.
Is there a more appropriate forum to ask this question?
Not that I am aware of, i think you asked it at the correct spot.
You might however want to resubmit this question on the forum over at http://www.vm-help.com
One of the moderators here ( ) maintains more user supported drivers and documents not officially supported setups over at his web site.
Hope this helps,
--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com
Contributing author at blog www.planetvm.net
Twitter: @wilva
