Intel Ethernet Connection I219-V not working under Linux on an ASUSPRO B laptop, e1000e driver reports: “The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid”

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I have a problem with an ASUSPRO B8430UA laptop: when I boot it with Ubuntu 16.04 (or NixOS 16.03) the Ethernet port does not work. The driver used is e1000e, it reports:

$ dmesg | grep e1000e
[    5.643760] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 3.2.6-k
[    5.643761] e1000e: Copyright(c) 1999 - 2015 Intel Corporation.
[    5.644308] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6: Interrupt Throttling Rate (ints/sec) set to dynamic conservative mode
[    5.877838] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6: The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid
[    5.907340] e1000e: probe of 0000:00:1f.6 failed with error -5

Under Windows 7 Ethernet port works fine: I can connect to the Internet.
According to Windows, I have Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I219-V.

I have searched for "official" Linux drivers, but none is listed as supporting I219-V. However, e1000e is listed as supporting I218-V, and I've got a confirmation from e1000-devel mailing list that e1000e should support I219-V. Just in case I tried using the latest version 3.3.4 of e1000e, but the error was the same: "The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid."

It looks like indeed there is a mismatch of the checksum of the non-volatile memory of I219-V.

I have tried another ASUS laptop of the same model, and the error was the same, so this does not look like an accidental corruption.

Neither ASUS nor Intel customer support could suggest any solution.

I have discovered Intel Ethernet Connections Boot Utility, but according to the documentation (for version 1.6.13.0) it is only intended for PCI, not OEM on-board, Ethernet cards. However, I decided to run it without parameters just to print the list of Intel network ports, and this is what I've got:

$ sudo ./bootutil64e

Intel(R) Ethernet Flash Firmware Utility
BootUtil version 1.6.13.0
Copyright (C) 2003-2016 Intel Corporation

Type BootUtil -? for help

Port Network Address Location Series  WOL Flash Firmware                Version
==== =============== ======== ======= === ============================= =======
  1   D017C2201F59     0:31.6 Gigabit N/A FLASH Not Present

I do not quite understand what "FLASH Not Present" means here.

I posed a question on SuperUser.SE about fixing the NVM checksum.
Here I am asking if and how anyone managed to successfully install Linux with working Ethernet on an ASUSPRO B8430UA laptop or on any other laptops with Intel Ethernet Controllers which had "The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid" error.

Best Answer

The e1000e driver is the one that can run the I2xx intel Ethernet Controllers. And the latest e1000e driver (as of this writing) is capable of running the I219 chip.

The The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid message during boot is what was preventing the older drivers from being loaded. On other OSes (notably MS windows) that error is ignored. But Linux appears to be stricter.

NVM is a ROM (read only memory) in the chip, which undergoes a checksum, and the older version of the e1000 driver was not aware of the NVM contents of the newer chips. Since the card works on other OSes that ignore the error another possibility could have been to force the driver to ignore the error.

The checksum is performed inside nvm.c, although other several models present their own fix_checksum functions that run before e1000e_validate_nvm_checksum_generic.

s32 e1000e_validate_nvm_checksum_generic(struct e1000_hw *hw)
{
        s32 ret_val;
        u16 checksum = 0;
        u16 i, nvm_data;

        for (i = 0; i < (NVM_CHECKSUM_REG + 1); i++) {
                ret_val = e1000_read_nvm(hw, i, 1, &nvm_data);
                if (ret_val) {
                        e_dbg("NVM Read Error\n");
                        return ret_val;
                }
                checksum += nvm_data;
        }

        if (checksum != (u16)NVM_SUM) {
                e_dbg("NVM Checksum Invalid\n");
                return -E1000_ERR_NVM;
        }

        return 0;
}

NVM_SUM is defined inside define.h

#define NVM_SUM                         0xBABA

If you are confident that the card runs (and only fails because of the NVM checksum) you can try to edit the checksum function to:

s32 e1000e_validate_nvm_checksum_generic(struct e1000_hw *hw)
{
        return 0;
}

And it will force the checksum to be always successful.

Extra (more-or-less) trustworthy references:

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