Packet-corruption with re(4)

Jeremy Chadwick koitsu at freebsd.org
Tue Apr 29 21:16:28 UTC 2008


On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:58:55PM +0200, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:08:34 -0700
> Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > I'd recommend staying away from Realtek NICs.  Pick up an Intel
> > Pro/1000 GT or PT.  Realtek has a well-known history of issues.
> 
> I hear that story very often, so often that I almost think it's a fairy
> tale. :-)
> Most of the times the "RealTek NIC" story is told, it isn't backed up
> with any references to evidence. Draw your own conclusions.

First, I'd check out the BUGS section of the re(4) and rl(4) manpages.

Second, I'd look at some of the CVS commit messages for said drivers;
you'll find a plethora of bugs which aren't mentioned in the manpages
either:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/pci/if_rl.c
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/re/if_re.c

Third, have you tried reading any of their technical/designer docs for
their ICs?  They're horrible.  Very hard to read, and lack concise
descriptions.  There's a lot of missing data.

> I can only tell in my experience (several motherboards from
> different manufacturers) with integrated RealTek NICs, both 10/100 and
> 10/100/1000), RealTek NICs have mostly been working as advertised,
> without trouble.

And in my experiences, Realtek PHYs are absolutely horrible when it
comes to auto-negotiation.  I've only had the "pleasure" of dealing with
Realtek trash on Windows, where occasionally you'll find a Changelog
that comes with the driver set.  They "play around" with auto-neg
methodologies in the code quite often.

If you go through the -stable archives, you'll see Realtek is
continually complained about from an end-user perspective.  The state of
affairs is sad, since many consumer motherboard vendors use Realtek
exclusively (I'm looking at you, Gigabyte).  It's sad that most (not
all) consumer boards lack Intel PHY/NICs these days.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |



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