Re: looking for testers for if_rge - RTL8125/8126/8127 ethernet driver

Hi all,

Thanks to flo for notifying me that there's an alternative to
net/realtek-re-kmod.

I've had crashes running realtek-re-kmod and realtek-re-kmod198
before, none of the switches seemed to help.
After upgrading to from 14.3 to 15.0-RC4-p1, I thought I'd test again.
So far so good, no crashes. Generating load with iperf for 5 minutes
from 2 machines to the server works OK with the 1101.00 for now.

Nice to have this if_rge in the back pocket when things don't work out
with 1101.00. Started porting it, find the patch at
https://brnrd.eu/bsd/patch-net_realtek-rge-kmod-20251129
Seeing that this is supposed to land in base, I'm holding back on committing it.

Thanks all! Bernard (brnrd@)

On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 5:48 PM Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 27 Nov 2025 at 10:13, Florian Smeets <flo@freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 23.11.25 03:16, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> > > hi!
> > >
> > > i've ported Kevin Lo's openbsd driver for these realtek chipsets to FreeBSD.
> > > It works well enough for me to use on my laptop w/ RTL8125B / Killer E3000.
> > > I'm now opening it up to others who are willing to build/run a kernel
> > > module to test the driver out and report back.
> > >
> > This is great. Finally, an in tree driver for these very common NICs.
> > The 1100.00 version of the net/realtek-re-kmod was just unreliable for
> > me (constant hangs, no matter which options I turned off and on). I've
> > only done light testing with the official 1101.00 driver. I was able to
> > wedge it with less than a minute of iperf3, and the ifconfig down/up
> > dance that was able to revive the interface with 1100.00 was not able to
> > recover the interface.
> >
> > I ran if_rge on my NAS and did some testing. I haven't had one hang with
> > this driver, even after pounding the network for hours. That's a big
> > plus for me. Thanks.
> >
> > I was able to achieve close to 2.5Gb/s TX and close to 1Gb/s RX with
> > iperf3 --bidir.
> >
> > CPU usage appears to be substantially higher than with the official
> > Realtek driver.
>
> That's a good data point.
>
> >
> > [intr{irq59: rge0}] goes to around 50% of one core, and [kernel{rge0
> > taskq thread}] hovers between 20-25% when running the above iperf3 tests.
> >
> > With the official 1101.00 driver, the only process using > 1% CPU is
> > this one [kernel{re0 taskq}] and it is around 10% with the test
> > mentioned above.
>
> I'll go dig into that a bit. It shouldn't be taking very much CPU to process
> this number of packets; the bulk of the CPU should be used by the IP stack.
>
> I'll go run some profiling over the next few days and see if I can nail down
> what I'm doing poorly. Hopefully it's something stupid on my end. ;-)
>
>
>
> -adrian
>