Realtek 8111E does not work

SandStar · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Jan 2005 Posts: 77

I'm in the process of installing Gentoo on my new computer. So far it has been quite frustrating.

I use stable packages and that brought in 2.6.38-gentoo-r6. I've compiled it with the r8169 driver and I can succesfully start eth0.
Internet also works, most of the time.
My 'dmesg' is flooded with "r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth0: link up"
Packetloss to my router is always between 11% and 15%. I've checked the cable and that one is fine. Windows Vista (dual boot) works perfectly with it.
SSH sessions are impossible as they timeout after just a few seconds.

So what should I do? Updgrade to an "unstable" kernel to make it stable? Install the realtek driver (from their site)?

SandStar · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Jan 2005 Posts: 77

Here's a part of my logfile to indicate the impact:

j_c_p · Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 3:09 pm Post subject:

Strange, I've got a 8111C Realtek which works well :

SandStar · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Jan 2005 Posts: 77

2.6.39-1 doesn't solve anything

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

I *think* there was something related to 8111E in the 3.0 kernel changelog.

You could backport the realtek driver from there or you could use the realtek driver from realtek directly.

Naib · Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 10:59 am Post subject:

use the realtek drivers from realtek website for this chipset, they have been bad and pushed out a new line of nic which have the same pci ID as an old line BUT there are enough differences to cause issues.
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Dakeyras · n00b Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 17

I have the same problem since this morning. My motherboard was changed this weekend from a P67 to a Z68 one, and I have experienced this bug when connecting from work to home through SSH: the link would only hold on for 10 or so seconds.

From another thread and people having no problem, the only common cause I can think of is that "(Rev 06)" mention in the lspci output, which I have as well. This leads me to believe that Naib's explanation is the correct one.

I'll try the driver from Realtek this evening and report about it, provided it works.

Edit: I rebuilt my kernel with the r8169 driver as a module, downloaded the r8168 driver from their website, ran the included shell script, and everything worked correctly after that.

SandStar · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Jan 2005 Posts: 77

Thought I'd give an update on this.
Latest 3.0 kernel still has a non-functioning realtek driver.

Bought an intel 1gbit pci nic to solve it...

Naib · Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 5:16 pm Post subject:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=250807

but like I said ... realtek drivers from their site
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lordof7 · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2008 Posts: 22

The realtek drivers (v. r8168-8.025.00) worked for me, but only after some effort. Turns out they built a weird hardcoded kernel version check into the src/Makefile, and this did not match version 3 kernels. I changed the sed regex in the "KEXT:=" line to allow the correct substitution.
Thanks to user Yudley on the Ubuntu forums who led me to this workaround:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1022411&page=9
(bottom of the page.)