I’m planing new MT mobo and I would like to know if there’s a chance that MT will support nforce3/4/5 integrated 1Gbps NIC?
It would be very interesting because that NIC is integrated in chipset itself and not attached to the PCI bus as all other external ethernet chips are.
Thus, it does not consume PCI bus bandwidth, so other ethernet and wifi cards can have a lot more bandwidth to use…
There are lots of different NIC Chipsets in those NF3/NF4 Mainboards. Could you be more specific?
I’m talking about NIC that’s integrated in NForce chipset itself and not added by some external chip. There are several versions of it, 100Mbps and 1Gbps, but all of them are run with “nvidia reverse ingenered” driver (forcedeth) in Linux.
So I guess it would take just one driver addition to make MT run all of them.
we only support chipsets that are supported by the linux kernel. we don’t add custom or hacked drivers.
it’s in official tree and it’s not marked as ‘experimental’ for a long time.
this is from the vanilla kernel tarball just downloaded from http://www.kernel.org/ :
Linux Kernel v2.6.20.1 Configuration
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── nForce Ethernet support ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ CONFIG_FORCEDETH: │
│ │
│ If you have a network (Ethernet) controller of this type, say Y and │
│ read the Ethernet-HOWTO, available from │
│ <http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto>. │
│ │
│ To compile this driver as a module, choose M here and read │
│ <file:Documentation/networking/net-modules.txt>. The module will be │
│ called forcedeth. │
│ │
│ Symbol: FORCEDETH [=y] │
│ Prompt: nForce Ethernet support │
│ Defined at drivers/net/Kconfig:1427 │
│ Depends on: NET && NETDEVICES && !UML && NET_PCI && PCI │
│ Location: │
│ -> Device Drivers │
│ -> Network device support │
│ -> Network device support (NETDEVICES [=y]) │
│ -> Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit) │
│ -> EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers (NET_PCI [=y])
and here’s the begining of drivers/net/forcedeth.c
/*
* forcedeth: Ethernet driver for NVIDIA nForce media access controllers.
*
* Note: This driver is a cleanroom reimplementation based on reverse
* engineered documentation written by Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
* and Andrew de Quincey.
*
* NVIDIA, nForce and other NVIDIA marks are trademarks or registered
* trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the United States and other
* countries.
*
* Copyright (C) 2003,4,5 Manfred Spraul
* Copyright (C) 2004 Andrew de Quincey (wol support)
* Copyright (C) 2004 Carl-Daniel Hailfinger (invalid MAC handling, insane
* IRQ rate fixes, bigendian fixes, cleanups, verification)
* Copyright (c) 2004,5,6 NVIDIA Corporation
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
* the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
* (at your option) any later version.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
* GNU General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
* along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
* Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
*
* Changelog:...
then are you sure that it is not working in RouterOS v3 ?
I’ve just checked 3.0beta6 on DFI Infinity NF4X (100Mbps NIC)
http://us.dfi.com.tw/Product/xx_product_spec_details_r_us.jsp?PRODUCT_ID=3590&CATEGORY_TYPE=MB&SITE=US
It does not work.
and ASUS K8N4-E (1Gbps NIC)
http://www.asus.com.tw/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=567&l1=3&l2=14&l3=172
It does not work.
Device is listed in “system resource pci print” just as it should be:
5 00:0a:0 nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controll... 4
(4 is IRQ number)
but no driver is loaded and no ethernet (nor any other) interface is shown in “driver print” and “interface ethernet print”.
Just to emphasize, forcedeth driver is in stable kernel tree for at least two years.
send a supout.rif file to support
I’ve tried to make supout.rif file but it took for ever (I’ve left it for couple of hours) and did not end at all. tried several times, then gave up. 
if you can, save backup, do reset-configuration, craete supout.rif and restore backup