Realtek 8139: Unpredictable, Best to Avoid

kyu

See if you can find a setting in the bios called "PCI latency timer". It usually defaults to 32. You can try raising it to 128 clocks. Also, disable any unused hardware like audio/ parallel ports.

You should be able to pick-up Intel GBe nics from second hand stores for dirt cheap. I recall seeing several at the small alleys just outside of Akiba.

Do you mind telling me roughly which side out of Akiba you saw them? I was flipping through the bins of all the shops I could find within 3 blocks west from the main street (Chuo Dori) in Akiba and all I found was probably 4 network cards and the two Intel 82550 at 300 a piece. Most shops don't carry used network cards anymore since there's little profit in them.. Thanks in advance.

kyu

Overnight the PC decided that the network card should be limited to 20Mbit, so I am back at the drawing board on how to make it 100Mbps.. odd prob..

stephenw10

I see that there may have been an issue with TSO in the fxp(4) driver specifically affecting the 8255X chip. Looks like it was patched in 2011. FreeBSD 8.1, the base for pfSense 2.0.2, is older than that but I know that more recent Intel drivers have been brought in. I don't know if that included fxp.
Try disabling TSO in System: Advanced: Networking: or try one of the 2.1 snapshots which will have newer drivers.

The box I have here has 7 Intel 10/100 interfaces and has never given any trouble. :-\

fxp0: <intel 10="" 100="" 82559er="" embedded="" ethernet="">port 0xd000-0xd03f mem 0xfdbf0000-0xfdbf0fff,0xfdb00000-0xfdb1ffff irq 19 at device 9.0 on pci4
fxp1: <intel 10="" 100="" 82559er="" embedded="" ethernet="">port 0xd100-0xd13f mem 0xfdbf4000-0xfdbf4fff,0xfdb20000-0xfdb3ffff irq 18 at device 10.0 on pci4
fxp2: <intel 10="" 100="" 82559er="" embedded="" ethernet="">port 0xd200-0xd23f mem 0xfdbf2000-0xfdbf2fff,0xfdb40000-0xfdb5ffff irq 17 at device 11.0 on pci4
fxp3: <intel 10="" 100="" 82559er="" embedded="" ethernet="">port 0xd300-0xd33f mem 0xfdbf6000-0xfdbf6fff,0xfdb60000-0xfdb7ffff irq 16 at device 12.0 on pci4
fxp4: <intel 10="" 100="" 82559er="" embedded="" ethernet="">port 0xd400-0xd43f mem 0xfdbf1000-0xfdbf1fff,0xfdb80000-0xfdb9ffff irq 19 at device 13.0 on pci4
fxp5: <intel 10="" 100="" 82559er="" embedded="" ethernet="">port 0xd500-0xd53f mem 0xfdbf3000-0xfdbf3fff,0xfdba0000-0xfdbbffff irq 18 at device 14.0 on pci4
fxp6: <intel 10="" 100="" 82559er="" embedded="" ethernet="">port 0xd600-0xd63f mem 0xfdbf5000-0xfdbf5fff,0xfdbc0000-0xfdbdffff irq 17 at device 15.0 on pci4</intel></intel></intel></intel></intel></intel></intel>

Steve

Edit: Hmmm, reading the fxp(4) man page I'm not sure the 82558 actaully supports TSO at all. :-\

dreamslacker

@kyu:

Do you mind telling me roughly which side out of Akiba you saw them? I was flipping through the bins of all the shops I could find within 3 blocks west from the main street (Chuo Dori) in Akiba and all I found was probably 4 network cards and the two Intel 82550 at 300 a piece. Most shops don't carry used network cards anymore since there's little profit in them.. Thanks in advance.

Been a while and I was only on a short holiday there.

Better luck asking this guy:
http://xmms.jp/blog/index.php?entry=entry101126-144051

Added advantage that it seems he runs & experiments with pfSense as well..

kyu

I disabled TSO and it didn't help and I believe I've upgraded to 2.0.2 previously and it didn't help. I will try again in a few hours when everyone's off.

The odd thing was that when I put in extra cards (without using them), the speed of the first 82558 jumped to 100Mbit range. I suppose the worst case is I'll put in the garbage Realtek 8139 as dummies and see if that helps the speed. They were going to the dump anyway…. :)

Thanks for your help. I'll track down that guy in Japan and ask him about where he sources his NICs

stephenw10

2.0.2 is current stable release, based on FreeBSD 8.1.
The snapshots based on FreeBSD 8.3 are for pfSense 2.1. See: http://snapshots.pfsense.org/

Steve

kyu

I just realized my fubar.

It was the traffic shaper limiting the speed to 20Mbit, not some "naturally" slowed down to 20Mbit. I started out with 65Mbit+ without the shaper, thought it was good enough and put in the shaper. Never did I suspect that the shaper actually put a cap on the speed of the LAN despite having the correct number put in….

Sorry guys, it's my fubar. The LAN card is fine and the PC wasn't doing anything weird. It's just me overlooking many things..

stephenw10

Easily done. Glad you got it sorted. :)

Steve

kyu

@stephenw10:

Easily done. Glad you got it sorted. :)

Steve

There's P2p abuse on the network, I will have to put in a shaper. Now the question is how to get the Shaper in place without limiting the potential of any router on the network accessing the available resource of the 65Mbit line… :-\

Good to know that the tried trust and true Intel 8255x are holding up though....

stephenw10

This should not be limiting to 20Mbps.
However this does put extra load on the cpu. It should be well within the capabilities of your P4 but check the output of 'top -SH' when it's limiting to make sure.

Steve

kyu

@stephenw10:

This should not be limiting to 20Mbps.
However this does put extra load on the cpu. It should be well within the capabilities of your P4 but check the output of 'top -SH' when it's limiting to make sure.

Steve

when I do top-Sh I can see the top going to 100%.. not exactly sure what i'm lookign at. If I just look at the output of top, everything's below 1%.

Without the shaper, the speed seems to vary (from 1 of the port of he switch) from 20 to 45Mbit as there are other traffic on the network. But whatever shaper I put in, it'll drop the speed down to below 20Mbit. I've tried different wizard, but they all seem to throttle the overall bandwidth even when I put in the correct up/down numbers.

My question is no longer with the hardware. Therefore I'll hop over to the other sub forum to troubleshoot traffic shaper.

Conclusion: Realtek 8139 can do the 100Mbit, but is unstable, a lot of crashes and resets. Intel 82559 is stable and able to do the 100Mbit throughput.