This is an early draft -- apologies for the lack of formatting. We are working with various revisions of the driver and will report back when we have more concrete information.
The sis190/191 chipset is present in the latest CentOS 5 kernels, however there are some issues:
- The driver fails to work in 64 bit mode.
- Although the driver works reliably at low speed, in order to communicate without losing a lot of packets it is necessary to change the MTU from the default of 1500 to 1492.
References:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/linux/+bug/341444 -- Note that this is one of many pages reporting issues with this driver / chipset in the x86_64 kernel and not the 32 bit kernel.
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11509 -- provides a reference to a patch and notes that the fix has been applied to the latest kernel git tree.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4838 -- first page I've found with a reference to changing the MTU to 1492. It refers to an old kernel and driver but I tried it and it seems to work for me.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=443302 -- upstream bug report also refers to changing the MTU to 1492.