Thomas Mathiesen’s Blog

So I got myself a new laptop and busy installing Xen. My problem is that the Sony Vaio comes with a Marvell PCI-E network card, and that isn’t supported by the default CentOS kernel.

Note that I am using the CentOS PLUS kernel with xen, so if you just want the normal kernel, you will have to find the correct package for your kernel.

More people seems to have some issues installing the driver for the network card, as you won’t have any network access (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/atrpms/users/12484)

Here’s how to do it (with Xen kernel):

1. Get kernel sk98lin-kmdl-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.centos.plusxen-10.50.1.3-12.el5.i686.rpm from http://atrpms.net/dist/el5/sk98lin/

2. Get the centos plus kernel http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5.3/centosplus/i386/RPMS/kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.centos.plus.i686.rpm

3. Copy these to a USB stick and onto your PC (with the Marvell network card).

4. Install the kernel (rpm -ivh kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.centos.plus.i686.rpm )

5. Install the sk98lin kernel module (rpm -Uvh sk98lin-kmdl-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.centos.plusxen-10.50.1.3-12.el5.i686.rpm )

6. Reboot

PS: lspci says “Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 12).
PPS: Thanks to Axel Thimm for packaging the sk98lin kernel module!