How to install better drivers for Intel LAN card in Fedora 18

Well well me hearties Fedora 18 is out and so sooner or later will be the so called tweaking guides. Toady we will look at how to get the latest and greatest Intel LAN e1000e driver installed on to your Fedora 18 system.

Under a root Konsole type the following :

 dmesg | grep e1000e

you should see something like [    9.400870] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 2.1


Visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/files/e1000e%20stable/2.2.14/e1000e-2.2.14.tar.gz/download

and download the latest driver. This should give you a file e1000e-2.2.14.tar.gz

now under the folder where the file has been downloaded issue the following command.

rpmbuild -tb ./e1000e-2.2.14.tar.gz

If you get any dependency errors install the missing files .. if all is well you should get the latest e1000e driver rpm

now issue the following rpm -Uvh /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/e1000e-2.2.14-1.x86_64.rpm


Preparing...                          ################################# [100%]

reboot the system 

...

dmesg | grep e100

[    9.400870] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 2.2.14-NAPI

[    9.400873] e1000e: Copyright(c) 1999 - 2012 Intel Corporation.

There you have the latest and greatest Intel e1000e LAN driver installed :) :) 

--- Important Update ---

I have just noticed that if you upgrade the kernel ... the system reverts to old 2.1x series of e1000e network driver. As the driver is compiled against the current kernel, here are the instruction to updated them to the current version.  After you have updated the kernel and rebooted once..

# service network stop
# rmmod e1000e
# rpmbuild -tb ./e1000e-2.2.14.tar.gz
# rpm -Uvh /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/e1000e-2.2.14-1.x86_64.rpm --force
# modprobe e1000e
# service network restart

Check to make sure ---
dmesg | grep e1000e


[13226.725837] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 2.2.14-NAPI
[13226.725842] e1000e: Copyright(c) 1999 - 2012 Intel Corporation.
[13226.725889] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: setting latency timer to 64
[13226.725986] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: Interrupt Throttling Rate (ints/sec) set to dynamic conservative mode
[13226.753249] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: irq 46 for MSI/MSI-X
[13227.015084] e1000e 0000:00:19.0 eth0: (PCI Express:2.5GT/s:Width x1) 00:1c:c0:0f:ae:40
[13227.015089] e1000e 0000:00:19.0 eth0: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection