Upgrading Nic driver firmware

[tech0925]

Hi all,

I was hoping someone could walk me through this process. I tried this in the past but I remember encountering errors so I was not able to update them. From what I can tell it is outdated and was hoping to update the driver and firmware. I'm just not comfortable trying this without out a bit of guidance.

Here is some background info and thanks in advance!.

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# dmesg | grep -i ethernet
[    8.794733] Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.7.1 (April 27, 2011)

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# /sbin/ethtool -i enp10s0
driver: e1000e
version: 3.2.6-k
firmware-version: 2.1-3
expansion-rom-version: 
bus-info: 0000:0a:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no

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# /sbin/lspci | grep Ethernet
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection
0a:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection

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# uname -a
Linux myserver.com 5.0.1-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Mar 10 10:09:55 EDT 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[TrevorH]

What are you really trying to achieve? I can see several potential problems in your post: first you appear to be running a bonded connection which is likely to be made up from more than one of your physical links.

Next, you have 4 of the worst ethernet cards that Intel have ever made. You'll almost certainly need to pass kernel parameters over to disable a bunch of stuff to make those work with any degree of reliability.

Then you are not running the distro kernel. And the driver for those cards is part of the kernel so the copy you are running is already as recent as it gets.

So, what is the actual problem that you're trying to solve by updating the NIC firmware? If you're experiencing weird hangs and errors in /var/log/messages then you probably need to disable pcie aspm via the kernel command line. No firmware update is ever going to fix those cards so that they work properly, the best you can do is disable all the bits that trigger the bugs in the hardware.