Question: Why ain't I getting gigabit speed?

Ronald F. Guilmette rfg at tristatelogic.com
Thu Feb 7 23:13:37 UTC 2013



I just aquired a brand new chepie gigabit PCI ethernet card off eBay.
The main chip on it appears to be an RTL8110S-32.

I stuck this card into a 9.1-RELEASE system that I have been putting
together, and it seemed to be recognized ok (as re0) upon boot up, so
I diddled my /etc/rc.conf file to get it to ifconfig as 192.168.1.3
on reboot.  Then I rebooted.

I have the card wired via a CAT6 cable to my Linksys E2000 gigabit
router.  Nonetheless, upon reboot, followed by "ifconfig -a", the
output from ifconfig says the following for this card:

re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=8209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,LINKSTATE>
	ether 00:13:3b:02:03:bd
	inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
	inet6 fe80::213:3bff:fe02:3bd%re0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x7 
	nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
	media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
	status: active

I've tried two different CAT6 cables, two different LAN ports on my E2000,
and I've even tried the card in two different PCI slost on my motherboard,
but the results are always the same.

So, um, what gives?  Why does the driver appear to be setting this card to
100baseTX rather than the 1000baseTX that I was hoping for?

Is there some magic spell that I am unaware of that I must cast on this
in order to get it to work right?


P.S.  dmesg has this to say about the card:

re0: <RealTek 8169/8169S/8169SB(L)/8110S/8110SB(L) Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xbe00-0xbeff mem 0xdf9ff000-0xdf9ff0ff irq 18 at device 5.0 on pci4
re0: Chip rev. 0x04000000
re0: MAC rev. 0x00000000
re0: Ethernet address: 00:13:3b:02:03:bd
re0: link state changed to UP
re0: link state changed to DOWN
re0: link state changed to UP


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