dhclient failure with Realtek 8111E Etnernet on new MSI motherboard

[Thomas Mueller]

I've been unable to establish Internet connection from a new computer with Realtek 811E Ethernet despite this Ethernet chip working on another computer with another MSI motherboard.

Problem motherboard is MSI Z77 MPOWER.

Older, by two years, motherboard is MSI Z68MA-ED55(B3).

uname -a shows

FreeBSD amelia2 9.2-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 9.2-PRERELEASE #17 r254196: Sun Aug 11 00:36:49 UTC 2013     root at amelia2:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SANDY  amd64

I get the same problem with FreeBSD 9.1_STABLE i386.

These are USB-stick installations.

I was able to connect to the Internet with (MSI) Winki 3 (Linux-based), included on a DVD included in the motherboard package.

After nothing but frustration trying to boot USB-stick installations of NetBSD 6.1-STABLE and HEAD (i386), I successfully booted NetBSD-HEAD amd64 from early last May, and "dhclient re0" was successful, whereupon I downloaded, by cvs, the HEAD source tree and pkgsrc tree.

This proves or strongly suggests the Ethernet chip is healthy.

Anything I can do (at loader prompt or loader.conf?) to make this Ethernet work in FreeBSD?

I could update NetBSD-HEAD from source, update the packages through pkgsrc, and build subversion, then checkout the FreeBSD-HEAD source tree, ports and doc trees too, and build FreeBSD-HEAD from source on hard drive using USB-stick installation of FreeBSD 9.2 (prerelease or release).

Related part of /var/run/dmesg.boot is

re0: <RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E/F PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xe000-0xe0f
f mem 0xf7d04000-0xf7d04fff,0xf7d00000-0xf7d03fff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci2
re0: Using 1 MSI-X message
re0: Chip rev. 0x2c800000
re0: MAC rev. 0x00000000
miibus0: <MII bus> on re0
rgephy0: <RTL8169S/8110S/8211 1000BASE-T 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
re0: Ethernet address: d4:3d:7e:97:17:e2


Log of "dhclient re0" was

DHCPDISCOVER on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPDISCOVER on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPOFFER from 192.168.1.1
DHCPREQUEST on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPREQUEST on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPDISCOVER on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
DHCPDISCOVER on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 17
DHCPDISCOVER on re0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.


Somewhat later I got

 Memory modified after free 0xfffffe0011546800(2048) val=977e3dd
4 @ 0xfffffe0011546800
Memory modified after free 0xfffffe001153b800(2048) val=ffffffff @ 0xfffffe00115
3b800
Memory modified after free 0xfffffe0011524800(2048) val=977e3dd4 @ 0xfffffe00115
24800
VESA: set_mode(): 24(18) -> 24(18)
Memory modified after free 0xfffffe0011594000(2048) val=977e3dd4 @ 0xfffffe00115
94000


In one case, when I went to bed on this, hours later the system crashed and went into the debugger (db>), where I was rather lost, couldn't kill dhclient, after some time types "reboot".

Should I have posted this to a different list (hardware, questions?)?

I would like to find if FreeBSD HEAD (10.0 alphas) would do better.  Also, because of nearness of 10.0-RELEASE, I would rather go this track than 9.2 and then update; I already have 9.2 prerelease on other computer.

Motherboard also has Atheros Wi-Fi (Atheros AR9271 802.11n), and I also have a USB stick-type WLAN adapter (Hiro Inc H50191, Realtek RTL8191SU 802.11n chip).

Tom