e1000e-dkms-debian VS bcm5719-fw

Hello, Our hardware vendor stopped selling the previous models of our standard desktops and laptops and possess sent the newest models in our latest purchase. Unfortunately, when installing Ubuntu on these machines the NICs are not recognized by the OS and need manual intervention to be updated, which I was able to get going by downloading the appropriate e1000e driver onto a USB and installing from that. Our standard workflow was provisioning the system with Foreman, and configuring it with ansible after the OS was installed. The manual steps now required between these steps have caused delays in setting up new equipment. Getting this hardware to allow PXE in the first place was a pain, I had to take the initrd.gz that foreman provides for the PXE environment, unpack it and replace the e1000e network driver with the very latest one to even allow the PXE process to start. But because the archive foreman uses for Ubuntu is the standard Canonical hosted Ubuntu archive, the OS is again missing that version of the driver and it needs to get updated again. Does anyone have recommendations on how to get around this? * I tried using HWE but it seems to not include this very latest version of e1000e so had no luck there * Could this process be included in the preseed file/provisioning template to handle the driver? * Our foreman install has Katello, but I have been having a hell of a time getting deb repos hosted. Even if that gets set up properly, it seems pretty‍ hacky again to insert a kernel with the correct driver version. (GPG issues? idk) * Foreman/Katello docs are lackluster and havent seen anything related to this kind of problem * FYI the desktop is a Dell Precision Tower 3650 and installing Ubuntu 18.04 I was hired as a Junior Sys Admin 2 years and now find myself as the sole IT in the company, this has been driving me nuts as my previous provisioning workflow was pretty solid but dont have anyone internal to turn to for advice. Would really appreciate any thoughts or ideas you all have or any resources you know of I can look into. Thanks! EDIT: Thanks for the replies everyone, I ended up getting this resolved by using DKMS. https://github.com/koljah-de/e1000e-dkms-debian was a good starting point, I built a deb from that and placed it on my tftp server. Then in Foreman's finish template I included the following lines: tftp -m binary tftp.example.com -c get e1000e-dkms.deb dpkg -i e1000e-dkms.deb That worked for me, after the installation process the NIC was usable. Plus this has the added benefit of not needing to tweak the drivers after upgrading the kernel at a later date.

Intel out-of-tree NIC drivers too; https://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/ - But there are not many!

[1] qemu/hw/net/e1000.c [2] Devices supported by Linux's e1000 [3] e1000 from Intel

I care! And I know a lot of people who care, but we are still a niche sized group. I care mainly because of Raptor Computing Systems offerings, which I think are the main (only?) OpenPOWER systems available. I use a Blackbird, and I'm happy with it.

From my own point of view, I'm willing to spend a $$$$ premium on hardware where I can have assurances that from the time I boot it, only code I authorize to run is run. Where every part of the system has code that, at least in principle, I or someone else could audit and fix. People have valuable IP stored on computers and it's worth much more than a few thousand dollars.

If you just look at price to performance, you are missing the point. Also, the price is not out of line with other niche desktops such as Apple's or System76.

There's not a lot of competition in this niche. The previous system that was useful was a ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard, which could be librebooted (https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html) I expect something new to come along in this space every 5-10 years.

For my purposes, I haven't fought with the software ecosystem, and was able to compile the very few packages that weren't already precompiled.

Here are some developments I think are worth noting:

* There is a libre driver for the onboard NIC. (https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw) This seems to be the only project that cares about blobs in every part of the board.

* Dasharo https://www.dasharo.com/ providing alternative boot firmware.

* Artic Tern, (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html) which is objectively still mostly a development platform (that if you're skilled you can get to work) provides a completely libre boot environment and the possibility of controlling other peripherals using only auditable code.

A few things have not yet made it onto the board:

* Flexver (https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve...) which would allow for verifying and auditing hardware, firmware and the boot process isn't commercially available yet.

* Ultravisor state enabling more secure VMs is still awaiting implementation AFAIK. (https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Power_ISA/Privilege_States#Ul...)

* I'm not aware of a lot of hardware that would take advantage of IBM CAPI 2.0 IO accelleration. Perhaps someone has some information on this.

* I'm not sure what the status of transactional memory is, but I'm not aware of it being used in software. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.

These would be nice to have, and I hope to have them in the future.

The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.

Here is the GitHub repository: https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw

bcm5719-fw - an alternative firmware for the network card Broadcom BCM5719;

bcm5719-fw - I saw announcement of this project on Raptor Forum. I will ask melrott, if there is intrest in introducing project at vPub.

The Talos II is blob-free. At launch, proprietary binary-only firmware was required for the network interface, but Raptor Computing Systems offered a bounty to reverse engineer and do a Free Software re-implementation of the firmware, and that effort succeeded and the bounty was paid. See:

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Project_Ortega

https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw

A clean-room RE requires one party to determine the behaviour of the original product, and write a spec for it. Then a second, completely different party must build the reimplementation using only that spec. They can't communicate with the first party through any means other than that spec. For a pretty clear example of this practice at work in open source, see the work to reverse-engineer and then reimpliment an open-source driver for the Broadcom BCM5719 NIC.

Adding to your great list, https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw/ . Clean-room firmware for the onboard Broadcom NICs in the Talos II / Blackbird.