[OmniOS-discuss] Realtek ethernet driver

[Frank Pittel]

I'm sorry for not replying earlier but the nic is working. I went out on Saturday and bought an intel nic and
after installing the new card I tried the Realtek nic again and it worked fine. No idea of what happened and why.

Frank


On Mon, Apr 06, 2015 at 10:08:12AM -0400, Eric Sproul wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 12:31 AM, Frank Pittel <fwp at deepthought.com> wrote:
> > I have an addon ethernet board in my machine that uses a RTL8169 chip. The driver loads and I am able to configure it and assign the nic an IP
> > address. However when I connect a cable to it the nic doesn't respond to ping, ssh, etc. The intel onboard nic works without issue.
> >
> > The relevent entry from lspci is:
> > Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8169 PCI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)
> >
> > Is there a known issue with the driver?
> >
> 
> Frank,
> This chip is ostensibly supported by rge(7D), but there are many
> revisions of that chip, used in a wide variety of adapters.  These are
> usually found more on desktop/enthusiast systems than server hardware,
> so the driver, rge, doesn't get a whole lot of attention.  The last
> substantive update to it was back in the OpenSolaris days, when Sun
> thought that developer laptops were a good distro target.  :/
> 
> It's possible there are newer revisions of the chip that have
> different enough PHYs that the driver doesn't know how to initialize
> the link.  If you could share the PCI ID of that part (`prtconf -d |
> grep RTL8169`), that would be helpful, but my guess would be that
> someone will have to take up the task of updating rge(7D) to support
> more parts.
> 
> And.. if it were me, I'd just forget about it and use the Intel port.
> If you need a second NIC, go Intel.
> 
> Eric