Re: Problems with realtek NIC

On Saturday, 1 May 2021 16:45:03 CDT Stefan Esser wrote:
> Am 01.05.21 um 21:48 schrieb Greg Rivers via freebsd-current:
> > On Saturday, 1 May 2021 14:09:46 CDT Nilton Jose Rizzo wrote:
> >> I using a FreeBSD 14-Current and get random error with my NIC. The watchdog timer send a timeout message and I loose connection temporaly. In logs show only this message:
> >>
> > Switch to the official Realtek driver in ports: net/realtek-re-kmod
> 
> The "official" RealTek driver is based on a very old version of "our"
> driver that was written by Bill Paul.
> 
> It lacks many features that have been introduced in FreeBSD in the
> last decade (or even earlier) like NETMAP-Support.
> 
> The RealTek-driver has special cases for some 50 variants of RealTek
> Ethernet chips and contains individual firmware patches for nearly all
> of them.
> 
> I had started to merge chip specific changes from the official driver
> to the FreeBSD driver in the hope to get it to support the RTL8125A/B
> chips. But I have stopped that project for lack of RTL8125 documentation,
> especially regarding the PHY, which has its own driver module in our
> version but not the RealTek code. (And somebody claimed to know that
> another FreeBSD developer was working on RTL8125 support but did not
> tell who that might be and whether he had documentation.)
> 
> Anyway, there are changes regarding the initialization and error recovery
> of different RealTek chips in the official driver that could be merged
> into our version. But I do not know whether these changes require the
> firmware changes provided by the RealTek driver to correctly work.
> 
Thanks for the information Stefan, and for your work on FreeBSD. My use of the term "official" was apparently inaccurate. I was not aware of the deficiencies in the RealTek driver. I would prefer to use the FreeBSD driver, but I don't for purely pragmatic reasons: the FreeBSD driver continually locks up and resets under load (as described by the OP), while the RealTek driver does not.

FWIW, here are the particulars on the RealTek chip-set that I've got:

re0: <RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E/F/G PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xe000-0xe0ff mem 0xb0804000-0xb0804fff,0xb0800000-0xb0803fff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci1
re0: Using 1 MSI-X message
re0: Chip rev. 0x2c800000
re0: MAC rev. 0x00100000

re0_at_pci0:1:0:0: class=0x020000 rev=0x06 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10ec device=0x8168 subvendor=0x1458 subdevice=0xe000
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

Would the FreeBSD Foundation be able to help with getting documentation from RealTek?

-- 
Greg