RTL8111/8168 and P55 integr. SATA Ctrl. (AHCI) for ESX 4

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http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1272

If you don't want the story: There is an oem.tgz with ESX 4 support for the Realtek RTL8111/8168 chipset and the P55 integrated SATA controller in AHCI mode attached to this post.

I have a nice new toy with a Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 motherboard. Unfortunately ESXi 4.0 doesn't support it out of the box. The GigE chipset Realtek RTL8111 ( PCI-ID: 10ec:8168 ) leaves you with the famous "Failed to load lvmdriver" error. Also my SATA controller running in AHCI mode ( PCI-ID: 8086:3b22 ) integrated in the Intel P55 chipset for the new LGA1156 Core i5 and Core i7 CPU's is not recognized.

The principle way to enable support in ESX for new devices is described here:

http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/customize_oem_tgz.php

That leaves you with the question where to get the proper device drivers ?

Luckily I found this post:

http://www.kernelcrash.com/blog/using-a ... 009/08/22/

So I followed the procedure and downloaded the ESX Open Source distribution from VMware and the latest r8168 Linux device driver package from Realtek's website ( version 8.014.00 ). With some minor modifications the r8168 driver did really compile without errors and was successfully loaded by ESX...

...just to leave me with an ESX Hypervisor without a datastore.

ESX didn't see the SATA controller even that I had entered the PCI-ID for it in the simple.map file, directing it to the ahci.o driver.

OK, good to have the sources. Taking a look into ahci.c showed that 3b22 was not listed in the pci_device_id structure. Well, I'm not an expert on Linux device drivers and I hope my simple hack doesn't wait with some later surprise but I simply added this value to ahci_pci_tbl. Crosschecking with the ahci.c version for Linux 2.6.31 on
http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v2.6.31/drivers/ata/ahci.c#L486 showed it there. Hopefully no special code to support it went into ahci.c between 2.6.18 and 2.6.31 but at least I didn't find any other reference to it.

Compilation of ahci.o went like a charm and adding it to the oem.tgz made my baby work with ESXi 4.0 !

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chinesestunna
                                                                                                       
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2011 12:00 pm
Posts: 26                               
                                                                                                                                                Re: RTL8111/8168 and P55 integr. SATA Ctrl. (AHCI) for ESX 4
                                                                                        I have switched to ESXi 5.0 and not looking back!  VT-d working correctly and I can confirm it does have correct drivers for RTL8111 LAN cards.  I'm now in the process of setting up my FreeNAS box on it
                                       

云代宪

好多啊，哈哈，谢谢您