strange bnx2 dkms behaviour.

[Guillaume Rousse]

Hello.

I'm the maintainer of mandriva xen package. As many dell users, I've
been hit by the infamous bnx2 driver bug. The dkms package found at
http://linux.dell.com/files/bnx2/xen-fix perfectly fixed it. Rather than
redistributing this dkms package in mandriva, I attempted to fix the
xen package directly by updating the shipped bnx2 driver.

So, I created a patch to update the three files from standard linux
2.6.18 tree (bnx2.c, bnx2_fw.h, bnx2.h) to the versions from the tarball
also found at http://linux.dell.com/files/bnx2/xen-fix/. It build
perfectly, modinfo bnx2 correctly returns the expected version
(1.4.51b), but it doesn't fix the issue: as soon as xen launches, the
network card turns non-functional :(

I unpacked the dkms package, carefully inspecting its content in order
to find any difference. Apart the binary drivers for redhat kernels
shipped therein, and the pci id list update (which seems unused by dkms
itself), I couldn't find any sensible difference: the source files are
exactly the same, and the few

So, can anyone here give me some hint about what kind of dark magic used
by dkms may explain this behavior difference ?
-- 
Guillaume Rousse
Moyens Informatiques - INRIA Futurs
Tel: 01 69 35 69 62