[OmniOS-discuss] Realtek ethernet driver

[Eric Sproul]

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