Problems with realtek NIC

[Stefan Esser]

Am 01.05.21 um 21:48 schrieb Greg Rivers via freebsd-current:
> On Saturday, 1 May 2021 14:09:46 CDT Nilton Jose Rizzo wrote:
>> I using a FreeBSD 14-Current and get random error with my NIC. The watchdog timer send a timeout message and I loose connection temporaly. In logs show only this message:
>>
> Switch to the official Realtek driver in ports: net/realtek-re-kmod

The "official" RealTek driver is based on a very old version of "our"
driver that was written by Bill Paul.

It lacks many features that have been introduced in FreeBSD in the
last decade (or even earlier) like NETMAP-Support.

The RealTek-driver has special cases for some 50 variants of RealTek
Ethernet chips and contains individual firmware patches for nearly all
of them.

I had started to merge chip specific changes from the official driver
to the FreeBSD driver in the hope to get it to support the RTL8125A/B
chips. But I have stopped that project for lack of RTL8125 documentation,
especially regarding the PHY, which has its own driver module in our
version but not the RealTek code. (And somebody claimed to know that
another FreeBSD developer was working on RTL8125 support but did not
tell who that might be and whether he had documentation.)

Anyway, there are changes regarding the initialization and error recovery
of different RealTek chips in the official driver that could be merged
into our version. But I do not know whether these changes require the
firmware changes provided by the RealTek driver to correctly work.

Regards, STefan

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