Question: Why ain't I getting gigabit speed?

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2013-Feb-07 15:13:27 -0800, "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg at tristatelogic.com> wrote:
>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'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.

Based on the testing you've done, I'd suspect a broken card.  I'll
echo the comments that Realtek is the cheapest end of the market and
you'd be better off with a Broadcom or Intel NIC.

>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

The critical information you've left out is the phy details.  This should
look something like:
miibus0: <MII bus> on re0
rgephy0: <RTL8169S/8110S/8211B media interface> PHY 1 on miibus0
rgephy0:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 10baseT-FDX-flow, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 100baseTX-FDX-flow, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-master, 1000baseT-FDX, 1000baseT-FDX-master, 1000baseT-FDX-flow, 1000baseT-FDX-flow-master, auto, auto-flow

On 2013-Feb-08 12:48:32 -0800, "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg at tristatelogic.com> wrote:
>I did some more experiments.  Fortunately, I had a CAT6 crossover cable
>lying around.

For future reference, you can join GigE interfaces with either straight
through or crossover cables.

>In the case of connecting to the laptop, all seemed to work correctly,
>however ifconfig showed that my re0 device in this case believed itself
>to be "master".  (I suspect that this may make a difference, and that
>the current FreeBSD re driver may perhaps behave better when it is
>acting as master.)

The "master" term seems to only define which end is the clock source.

>in the output from "ifconfig re0", *however* a moment or two later,
>suddenly the connection was entirely dropped, and now the ifconfig
>output said "no carrier".

What status was reported on the lights at each end?

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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