Unable to detect Intel's X540 network controller

Just got my hands on a Gigabyte MD80-TM0 motherboard to help run my Ubuntu Server.

During the hardware detection process of the Ubuntu Server 14.04.4 (and 15.10) installation it reported that “No network interfaces detected”. Despite the fact the network cable plugged into the motherboard’s LAN port was showing solid colours indicating it had identified at a 1Gbps data rate and the BIOS showed MAC addresses for both LAN ports.

As far as I can tell the on board LAN ports are handled by Intel’s X540 chipset which I believe should be supported as part of the default installation.

Finishing the installation allowed me to specifically add “ixgbe” to the end of /etc/modules which had no effect. Further diagnostic commands show only a Local Loopback interface:

sudo ifconfig -a
lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 RX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelan:0 RX bytes:1184 (1.1 KB) TX bytes:1184 (1.1 KB)
cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
ls /sys/class/net
lo

The following commands return nothing

sudo lshw -C network
dmesg | grep -e eth0
lspci -nnk | grep 0200 -A2

If I need to update my drivers I will need to buy a separate PCIe Network Card that has a good compatibility with Linux to allow me to download the necessary packages to install the drivers. Before I spend any money I just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing something silly.

1 Answer

Turns out the motherboard has a sneaky clause in its documentation stating "If only 1 CPU is installed, some PCIe, memory, network or I/O functions will not be available." which translates to the network controller will not work if you only have 1 CPU installed.