Support for newer Ethernet chips in RE(4) driver?

Mark Martinec Mark.Martinec+freebsd at ijs.si
Fri Oct 8 15:31:09 UTC 2010


The current re(4) Realtek Ethernet adapter driver supports the
8139C+/8169/816xS/811xS/8101E chips, but lacks support for newer
Realtek network interface controllers such as RTL8111 C/E/D,
the RTL8168 series and some other.

This is unfortunate as the RTL8111E and RTL8111D controllers
found their way (in singles or in pairs) into the current families
of GigaByte motherboards (such as GA-X58A-UD9/7/5/3R, GA-H55M*, ...),
and RTL8111C found its way into Asus motherboards (such as P6T),
and quite likely into other newer products.

An updated re driver source for FreeBSD 8.0 is available from
the Realtek's web site ( http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/ )
and claims to add support for chips and chipsets:

  RTL8111/RTL8111B/RTL8111C/RTL8111CP/RTL8111D(L)/RTL8111DP/RTL8111E
  RTL8168/RTL8168B/RTL8168C/RTL8168CP/RTL8168D/RTL8168E
  RTL8169S/RTL8169SB/RTL8169SC
  RTL8101E/RTL8102E/RTL8103E/RTL8401E/RTL8105E

I tested the new Realtek driver with RTL8111E on FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE,
works well.

Any chance of importing the updated driver (or adding support
for newer chips in some other way) into CURRENT so that it
could find its way to the 9.0 ?

  Mark


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