
Re: ASIX AX88179_178a USB NIC Driver by Trickstarter
I've recently looked back into this and it turns out the driver that @Trickerstarter wrote a couple of years back was specifically for ESXi 5.1 and if you try to load this on ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 host, it will fail the namespace dependency check with the following error:
Code:
vmkwarning.log:2016-02-28T21:54:54.531Z cpu6:374787)WARNING: Elf: 2041: Load of <usbnetvz026> failed : missing required namespace <com.vmware.usb#9.2.1.0>
Both ESXi 5.5/6.0 include a newer namespace version, ESXi 6.0 uses 9.2.3.0. For this to work, a new version would need to be compiled using the respective ESXi OSS packages. The other challenge that I've found is that it seems there were some amount of non-trivial code changes to the existing ax88179 driver packages to get this working. I've not found the diff of those changes anywhere on this thread, so I assume those would also be needed.
I just did a recent write up here
Working USB Ethernet Adapter (NIC) for ESXi on this topic since I was interested to confirm and see which particular USB Ethernet Adapter actually worked with ESXi. A bit of bread crumb from the VMware Community Forums (VMTN) lead me back to this forum and tried to put the pieces together.
If there's anyone familiar with the changes, feel free to hit me up as I'll try to see if I can build a newer version of the driver, but without the explicit changes from Trickstarter, it might be a bit difficult.