drivers for dell network card

[al-lex]

I'm no linux guru but I've learned a few commands now. I got two dell R720 servers. In Feb, we got 7.4.1708 installed on server1. Couple weeks ago I installed 7.4 on server2. I ran the command, #dmesg | grep -i ethernet, on server 1 and got bnx2x: Broadcom NetXtreme II 5771x/578xx 10/20-Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2x 1.78.17-0 (2013/04/11). When I ran the command on the new server 2, it did not show anything. I'm not sure how one has a driver and the other doesn't. Network connection works but I can't seem to find new drivers on dell support site.
If anyone can help me, thanks.

[avij]

Maybe you should try lspci instead:

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lspci -nn | grep -i ether
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme BCM5720 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe [14e4:165f]
02:00.1 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme BCM5720 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe [14e4:165f]

Besides, if it works, you should not need to get drivers from Dell.

[TrevorH]

And the chances are that you don't want to use the Dell drivers anyway. It's most likely the devices are already supported by the CentOS kernel.

Your dmesg | grep will only find messages containing the word 'ethernet' and not all network card drivers emit messages containing that text.

[al-lex]

Ok, thanks.
I tried the lspci on both servers and both have the broadcom.

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lspci -nn | grep -i ether
01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme II BCM57800 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:168a] (rev 10)
01:00.1 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme II BCM57800 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:168a] (rev 10)
01:00.2 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme II BCM57800 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:168a] (rev 10)
01:00.3 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme II BCM57800 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:168a] (rev 10)

Internet works and file tranfers work, but a cron job that usually took 10-12 secs now is taking up to 30 minutes on server 1. The new server 2 is working at 10-12 secs.

[TrevorH]

One possibility to explain why you don't see the same info in dmesg is that command displays the kernel in-RAM ring buffer and if something has generated a lot of logging since it was booted up, the older messages will have wrapped round and disappeared. A reboot would start the buffer over from scratch.

On a 7.5 system with a 57810

04:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme II BCM57810 10 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:168e] (rev 10)

I get

[ 2.948760] bnx2x: QLogic 5771x/578xx 10/20-Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2x 1.712.30-0 (2014/02/10)

and on a 6.10 system with the same card that you have I see

01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme II BCM57800 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:168a] (rev 10)

bnx2x: QLogic 5771x/578xx 10/20-Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2x 1.712.30-0 (2014/02/10)

Those are all using the built-in CentOS kernel supplied drivers which appear from both the version number and the embedded date that they spit out to be newer than the ones you have in use on your system.

Also look at the output from ip link sh and see what that says and also lspci -vv -d 14e4:168a will show you more information than you ever wanted to know about the cards and their config but on each one it should have a section that says something like

Kernel driver in use: bnx2x
Kernel modules: bnx2x

[avij]

For the cronjob time difference, there could be tons of reasons for that. Perhaps it's an application level issue, not a hardware/driver issue. Examining the logs for any error/warning messages could be a good starting point.