interface re0

[Tom Samplonius]

----- "Eilko Bos" <eilko at bos-zuidema.nl> wrote:
...
> I still
> see this message:
> 
> re0: <RealTek 8169SB/8110SB Single-chip Gigabit Ethernet> port
> 0xb800-0xb8ff mem 0xf7000000-0xf70000ff irq 11 at device 15.0 on pci0
> re0: MII without any phy!
> device_attach: re0 attach returned 6
> 
> Does anybody have an idea how this can be fixed? This is my complete
...

  Well, MII, stands for media-independent-interface.  Since there are many different types of ethernet media, the idea was to develop a standard hardware interface for the media chip (which is called the PHY).  Then you can can connect any media chip to any controller chip, and you'd have a NIC.  Apparently, your card claims to have use a MII, but when the driver probes the MII, it does not find a PHY.  But your NIC might not actually use the MII, and might have the PHY function directly incorporated in the NIC (the "Single-chip" reference is a hint).

  I recommend you do a rebose boot (which will print the PCI id of the card), and attach it to  a PR.  Perhaps the re maintainer can hack the driver for a special exception for your NIC.

  But em cards (Intel Pro1000GT Desktop) cards are very cheap, and do work.  Why buy RealTek?  RealTek has been outputting overly simplistic hardware since the beginning.  If there was a corner that could be cut when building a NIC, a RealTek engineer thought of it first.


Tom