I'm trying to setup esxi 4.1 on an Intel DP67BA motherboard that has a built in Intel 82579LM gigabit NIC. It's a failry newish socket 1155 motherboard and intel's website only has windows drivers for it with no Linux drivers there.

Evidently linux does seem to have drivers for it according to this link:

http://ircbots.nanonanonano.net/factoid.php?key=82579

And the drivers are a variation on the e1000e NIC driver. Is this enough information for me to begin to compile an esxi compatible driver for this NIC..how would I go about doing that?

Going through the PDF manual of the motherboard I see that it is supposed to have this:


Intel 82579V Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mb/s) Ethernet LAN controller

So I guess it's a 82579V as well as known as an alias of 82579LM.

There's a good post about compiling drivers here - http://www.kernelcrash.com/blog/using-a ... 009/08/22/.

Since you'll just be updating the source for the e1000e driver you should be able to use VMware's source as a sample of what you need to update. Do you have a download link for VMware's source for the driver?

Not at this point, I'm totally new at this. I assume the e1000e source is somewhere inside the big 600MB tarball on vmware's open source page?

Is it possible to make things simpler and just use the linux driver for the NIC?

Yup - it's in the 600 mb download. The VMkernel of ESXi is not Linux based. ESXi makes use of some Linux utilities and open source code, but drivers are not directly compatible. The Linux driver compatability mode for ESXi allows for the use of Linux source for drivers, but the source still have to be tweaked for use with ESXi (same for ESX).