Unsupported RealTel 8139

[Paul Schenkeveld]

Hi Bill and all,

Seeking replacement for dumb terminals by small diskless FreeBSD
workstations I found a small VIA Eden based single board system
which fits all mys customers needs, except the on-board RealTek 8139
doesn't work with a 4.9-R kernel.

I've set up a PXE environment and during kernel initialisation
rl0 is recognised but reports: "rl0: unknown device ID: 1400".
So I tried putting this device ID into if_rl.c.

Now I get:

  rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe800-0xe8ff mem 0xe5810000 0xe58100ff irq 15 at device 13.0 on pci0
  rl0: Ethernet address: 00:00:00:00:00:00

At the end of kernel initialisation I see:

  Sending DHCP Discover packet from interface rl0 (00:00:00:00:00:00)

which is obvious but does not work of course.

Any chance of getting this NIC to work?

I've got one unit here to test, I've got a DDB kernel at hand but
only a PS/2 keyboard and VGA screen to communicate.  Please let me
know if I need to provide any more information or if I can dig up
more details using DDB or a patched kernel.

Here's the print on top of the chip:

  RTL8139C
  39118A1
  337B TAIWAN

Regards,

Paul Schenkeveld, Consultant
PSconsult ICT Services BV