Various problems with re(4) on a PCIe 8168/8111B onboard NIC

[Laurens Timmermans]

Michael Nottebrock schreef:
> After recently updating the windows drivers (I dual-boot Windows XP on the 
> machine the NIC is in), I hit this problem: 
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_RTL8168#Troubleshooting which affects re(4) 
> like it does the Linux drivers described in the above link. 
> 

I also noticed this and the workaround as explained in the gentoo-wiki 
works.

> I already wrote the Realtek technical support about it since their "own" 
> FreeBSD driver (a hacked rl(4) that does not support any of the chip's 
> advanced features) does not manage to power up the PHY on its own either - 
> neither does the motherboard's BIOS when trying to netboot.
> 

I have done the exact same thing and was surprised to receive a 
response. Attached to this response was a beta-version of their (rl) 
driver. After a quick test it seemed to have fixed the problem.
I have been trying to fix the issue in re(4) by looking at the changes 
in the beta-driver but have not had any success so far (due to lack of 
knowledge i guess).
I put the beta driver up here: 
http://www.timkapel.nl/~laurens/rtl_bsd_drv_v174beta3.tgz

> The other problem is that I have at least two applications misbehaving when 
> rxcsum/txcsum is enabled: 
> 
> - The Linux Second Life client (yes, yes, I know, but it is nice for showing 
> off GLX and it is really really good at generating network traffic) will 
> cease to receive data after about a minute or so - turning off rcxsum/txcsum 
> will mend it on the spot.
> 
> - A Fedora Core 4 running in Qemu, networked with bridge(4) and tap(4), cannot 
> receive an ip address via DHCP. Interestingly, this even occurs if 
> rxcsum/txcsum was already turned off before launching Qemu - to make it work, 
> I have to cycle rxcsum/txcsum once. Might be related to promiscuous mode.
> 
> I realise that both of these make awful test cases, but so far they are the 
> only applications I found to expose those problems.
> 
> This is on FreeBSD kiste 6.2-STABLE FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE #4: Sat Jul 28 14:11:23 
> CEST 2007     root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/KISTE-SMP  i386. The kernel sources 
> are up to date as of 2007-07-27.
> 
> The NIC is re0: <RealTek 8168/8111B PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xd800-0xd8ff 
> mem 0xfbfff000-0xfbffffff irq 36 at device 0.0 on pci3 / re0 at pci3:0:0: 
> class=0x020000 card=0x81681849 chip=0x816810ec rev=0x01 hdr=0x00.
>