Realtek NIC update for testing

[Lars Schotte]

Wait a moment. I have been seeing one issue on this realtek cards,
reproducible on Linux and FreeBSD.

The problem was that when you hit a realtek card with gigabit speeds,
both ways at the same time, for example with NFS, having a pf firewall
in place, you will get a watchdog timeout.

Problems like this do not happen on Intel NICs.
Some report that problems go away with Realtek official driver (from
their website), but havent tried that (I solved the problem by buying a
intel nic).

Also surprising was that I tested some old PCI RTL8169SC and they max
at 150 Mbit/s even though they should (in theory) transfer gigabit.

To me it blows my mind how can someone sell such hw. And ppl like me
not even noticing until having replaced all switches with gigabit and
noticing a bottleneck somewhere in the net I did not expect.

On cheap mainboards sometime they do put in Atheros, you do not see
that happening there. For me, every realtek nic is a 100Mbit/s nic no
matter if it is a 100Mbit/s nic or gigabit.

I d like to know your opinions on it. And second I am interested if
dragonfly has a driver that is somewhat different from FreeBSD's or
Linux's (they behave the same way).

Thanks.

On Tue, 7 Nov 2017 20:37:10 +0100
Daniel Bilik <ddb at neosystem.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Nov 2017 22:11:02 +0800
> Sepherosa Ziehau <sepherosa at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > For users have re(4):
> > https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/re194.diff
> > ...
> > Please test it, and let me know the result.
> 
> Thank you. Tested with...
> 
> re0 at pci0:3:0:0:	class=0x020000 card=0x81681849 chip=0x816810ec
> rev=0x11 hdr=0x00 vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
>     device     = 'RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
> Controller'
> 
> ... works fine, no problems observed.
> 
> --
> 						Dan



-- 
 Lars Schotte
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