Red Hat Knowledgebase

The netdump kernel debugging tool requires that the network card driver supports the Netpoll infrastructure.

A simple way to check what drivers have this capability is to install the kernel-source package and search the source code in /usr/src/kernel-<version> for the definition HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER.

To search for the network card drivers that support Netpoll (assuming that you have the kernel-source package installed), issue the command grep -r "HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER" /usr/src/linux-<version>/drivers/net :

 
$ grep -r "HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER" /usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/3c59x.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/3c59x.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/e100/e100_main.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/e100/e100_main.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/e1000/e1000_main.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/e1000/e1000_main.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/e1000/e1000_main.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/eepro100.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/eepro100.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/pcnet32.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/pcnet32.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/tg3.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/tg3.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/tlan.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/tlan.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/tulip/tulip_core.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER
/usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/tulip/tulip_core.c:#ifdef HAVE_POLL_CONTROLLER

The output shows that the source files for the 3c59x, e100, e1000, eepro100, pcnet32, tg3, tlan, and tulip network drivers support Netpoll.

If the system has any of these cards/chipsets for network devices it is very likely that Netpoll is supported and that netdump will work.

To see if your network interface uses any of these drivers, look in the file /etc/modules.conf:

# cat /etc/modules.conf
alias eth1 e100
alias eth0 8139too
alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio
...

NOTE: To verify that the package kernel-source is installed, use the command rpm -qi kernel-source

 
$ rpm -q kernel-source
kernel-source-2.4.21-15.0.4.EL

To install the kernel-source package for a system registered with Red Hat Network (RHN), issue the command: up2date -i kernel-source --force