I really don’t know why ethernet device makers insist on making it hard for to use their products. Ethernet has been around for many, many years; surely its not too much to ask for drivers that “just work”.
And so that’s the problem I currently have with my new computer. It has an onboard Ethernet interface which uses a Realtek chip and that’s where the problems have been (with the exception of a power button that wriggled free, but that is also easy to fix).
The device comes up as:
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 06)
I’ve used:
- The R8169 driver that comes with most of the Debian kernels
- r8168-dkms driver
- The 8168 driver from the realtek site
and all of them don’t work. It seems that the receive side works fine (I sometimes get a valid IPv6 address) but no packets are sent, even ifconfig eth0 shows zero transmitted packets.
ethtool shows some of the setup, this is with the r8168 driver:
driver: r8168 version: 8.037.00-NAPI firmware-version: bus-info: 0000:03:00.0 supports-statistics: yes supports-test: no supports-eeprom-access: no supports-register-dump: yes supports-priv-flags: no
Interestingly, if I use the r8169 driver in the kernel and try ifup etho then I do get an entry in the firmware-version spot.
dmesg also shows that it finds the device.
[ 0.916487] r8168 Gigabit Ethernet driver 8.037.00-NAPI loaded [ 0.916667] r8168 0000:03:00.0: irq 72 for MSI/MSI-X [ 0.939129] r8168: This product is covered by one or more of the following patents: US6,570,884, US6,115,776, and US6,327,625. [ 0.939136] r8168 Copyright (C) 2013 Realtek NIC software team <[email protected]> [ 10.807066] r8168: eth0: link up
So it all looks good, except it won’t send any packets. Anyone got one of these devices and if so (and more importantly) how did you get it to work?