FreeBSD doesn't recognize onboard RTL8139

[Brett Glass]

At 05:38 PM 6/18/2003, Daniel Gustafson wrote:

>There is one RTL8139 identified:
>
>rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe000-0xe07f mem
>0xe4100000-0xe410007f irq 15 at device 7.0 on pci0 
>rl0: Ethernet address: 00:40:f6:b4:76:b1 
>miibus0: <MII bus> on rl0
>rlphy0: <RealTek internal media interface> on miibus0 
>rlphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
>
>And then it finds an Intel Pro NIC:
>
>fxp0: <Intel Pro 10/100B/100+ Ethernet> port 0xe400-0xe41f mem
>0xe4000000-0xe40fffff,0xe4101000-0xe4101fff irq 10 at device 10.0 on
>pci0 
>fxp0: Ethernet address 00:30:00:03:c8:06
>inphy0: <i82555 10/100 media interface> on miibus1
>inphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

So it does. And just before I received your message, I found out
why.

All of the manufacturer's literature says that the board has the
Realtek chip. The accompanying CD even includes Realtek drivers.

But if you disassemble the chassis to expose the LAN circuitry
(which lies, alas, under a whole bunch of brackets, etc. that
must be removed), and look at the only LSI chip in that section
of the board really carefully, you'll see the part number:

82558B.

Apparently, the motherboard wasn't equipped as the manufacturer
claimed.

I'm not complaining, though. As I understand it, the architecture
and DMA scheme of this chip work much better with BSD's IP stack
and mbuf memory allocation scheme than do those of the Realtek.

Now, I need to get an e-mail back from the (Taiwanese) company to 
find out if (a) I got the wrong board; or (b) they've switched to
the better (and more expensive) chip.

I'm glad that FreeBSD discovered the discrepancy....

--Brett