I have encountered exactly the same problem. Got four new Dell servers (2xR820, 2xR620), all with Broadcom 5720. I have installed Wheezy on all of them, including Xen. But only on two of them, I have installed firmware-linux-nonfree and only on ONE of them (namely R820), the NIC behaves like Casper described. Which leads me to assumption, that it is not related to Debian firmware package, but I can't confirm that, because i don't know for sure if the problem has existed before the installation. To clarify: it gets more complicated, because if I run Lifecycle Manager, the NIC initializes to some state where it can be used in Wheezy, until next complete power disconnect. And before first installation I was of course in LCM.
I have spent last few days with thorough testing and got to these conclusions: - downgrading/upgrading firmware through Dell firmware utility didn't help for me - under 2.6.32 kernel (tested with Centos), NIC works ok - under 3.x.x kernel NIC fails (tested with stock kernel in Wheezy, Ubuntu 12.04 and ELREPO kernel 3.8.8 in Centos) - drivers ver.3.124 directly from Broadcom compiled against Wheezy kernel, behave the same Then I have noticed small patch in 3.2.43: "tg3: fix length overflow in VPD firmware parsing", so I have compiled vanilla kernel and got the NIC working correctly. I will yet try to apply this patch on stock Wheezy kernel, but I believe that the problem lies there. Hard to tell why only one card from four tested should return bad value to break the driver, but who knows. -- View this message in context: http://debian.2.n7.nabble.com/Wheezy-issue-with-broadcom-5720-nic-on-new-dell-PowerEdge-R720-tp2892237p2922675.html Sent from the Debian User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1366996406918-2922675.p...@n7.nabble.com