For the benefit of others having similar issue:

Identified the issue, there was an older driver (sk98lin.o) already present in the directory:

/lib/modules/2.4.27/kernel/drivers/net/sk98lin/

which was probably conflicting due to a line pointing to that driver in file

/lib/modules/2.4.27/modules.dep

Will try and use modprobe/insmod to use that driver instead of the newer one