[nycbug-talk] Intel EM/IGB Version question

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday, April 16, 2013 2:15:19 pm Mark Saad wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 1:34 PM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > On Tuesday, April 16, 2013 12:34:57 pm Mark Saad wrote:
> >> Talk
> >>  I am looking into upgrading the em and igb driver used in FreeBSD
> >> 9.1-RELEASE . I want to investigate an issue at work, and I want to
> >> see how igb 2.3.8 works vs the stock one. This lead me to discover a
> >> good question.  Is there any way to tell the version of a driver, from
> >> userland in FreeBSD ?  In particular how can I tell which version of
> >> the em and igb driver I am using ? I can see from the detailed release
> >> notes that 9.1-RELEASE has Igb version 2.3.4 and em version 7.3.2 but
> >> other then that is there a way ?
> >
> > They print the version number out in dmesg during boot, e.g.:
> >
> > igb0: <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection version - 2.3.10> port 0xe880-0xe89f
> >  mem 0xfbe60000-0xfbe7ffff,0xfbe40000-0xfbe5ffff,0xfbeb8000-0xfbebbfff irq 32 at
> >  device 0.0 on pci5
> >
> > You can also look for the relevant string in the sources:
> >
> > % grep 'driver_version\[' /sys/dev/e1000/*
> > /sys/dev/e1000/if_em.c:char em_driver_version[] = "7.3.8";
> > /sys/dev/e1000/if_igb.c:char igb_driver_version[] = "version - 2.3.10";
> > /sys/dev/e1000/if_lem.c:char lem_driver_version[] = "1.0.6";
> >
> > --
> > John Baldwin
> 
> John
>   Thanks for the pointer , I missed the obvious place, dmesg . Other
> then adding new hardware support is there a detailed change log for
> the new version of the driver ? Would it be prudent to upgrade to the
> newer driver ? Also Does anyone know if in 9.x can you load a module
> and use that module even if this code is statically built into the
> kernel ? I believe the answer is no  , not with out hacking the module
> code but I am right ?

Well, there isn't usually a good changelog and em/igb updates sometimes
have regressions (though I think those have gotten better as of late).

To get a module to override the built-in driver you would have to hack
the module to use a better priority in its probe routine.

-- 
John Baldwin