[OpenIndiana-discuss] Network (RTL8111/8168) not working properly on OpenIndiana 151a

[Lou Picciano]

Robin, 

Not sure about all this. Like you, I have a mobo which has (in our case, two) RTL8111Es. Ours is a GigaByte GA-P67A-UD7-B3. Also, like you, I'd been sternly warned off these interfaces. 

Also, like you, we'd been seeing spurious instability problems, and have been working hard to run them all to ground. One looked like a drive problem, then memory became suspect. In one series, it turned out we really did have a defective CPU. In all recent 'events', however, the network has stayed up. The current leading contender is an odd, ever-increasing, interrupts fault count on SandyBridge CPUs, apparent in vmstat. After a few days of uptime, this number has easily gotten over 1.6 million (!!); The machine does eventually just lock up. Current plan may be to move to dev-il, where some patches have been applied (??) 

Curious, which Mobo are you talking about? And, any chance you're running SandyBridge on it? 

Lou Picciano 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Axelsson" <gu99roax at student.chalmers.se> 
To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org 
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 10:34:20 AM 
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Network (RTL8111/8168) not working properly on OpenIndiana 151a 

On 2011-12-29 10:53, Edward Martinez wrote: 
> On 12/28/11 13:24, Robin Axelsson wrote: 
>> After a fresh install of OI 151a I discovered that the network 
>> connection fails intermittently. Firefox stalls in OI, SSH sessions 
>> spontaneously get severed, internet/network availability goes on and 
>> off with this connection. 
>> 
>> Basically the behaviour is the same as when I was running earlier 
>> builds of OpenSolaris on a machine with the RTL8111DL chip. When 
>> asking the question on the Osol forums the reply was that this was a 
>> known bug and the recommendation was to get an Intel based NIC. Later 
>> I was informed that this bug was resolved in later builds of 
>> OpenSolaris. So when I upgraded to build 134, the RTL8111DL started 
>> working without problems. I even upgraded to OpenIndiana 148 and 
>> still no problems. 
>> 
>> Now I have replaced the motherboard on that system to a motherboard 
>> with the RTL8111E chip. Since my hard drive died I have done a fresh 
>> install of OI 151a on a new hard drive and once again this network 
>> bug has woken up from its apparently dormant state. 
>> 
>> Has someone accidentally put an old version of the rge driver into 
>> the OI distribution? If not, does anyone have any idea as to why this 
>> problem has come back? 
>> 
>> I tried to replace the rge driver with the gani 2.6.8 driver but the 
>> problem was slightly worse on the gani driver. Even my VMs hang when 
>> using the gani0 connection (bridged networking on VBox). 
>> 
>> I have tried using an Intel network card with the e1000g driver and 
>> it has shown no problems whatsoever on my system. 
>> 
>> So is this problem fixable or will I have to use Intel NICs with my 
>> system? 
>> 
>> Robin. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________ 
>> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list 
>> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org 
>> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss 
>> 
> i have read it is troublesome to get the rge driver working. maybe, 
> the rge driver fixes do not cover the RTL8112E chipset. 
> 
> This article mentions a few work around for opensolaris, that may 
> apply to OI. However, i think you are better of using the intel nic 
> since you are not having problems. 
> 
> http://sigtar.com/2009/02/12/opensolaris-rtl81118168b-issues/ 
> 
> _______________________________________________ 
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list 
> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org 
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss 
> 
> 

Yes, I've been to that page, in fact, it was this page that helped me 
find the gani driver. And it is the RTL8111E chip and _not_ the RTL8112E 
chip we are talking about here. Also, the Realtek controller show no 
problems in a Windows environment. 



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