Realtek 8111G Support

Guldil

oh man you are my hero ;-)

I can't get an ip with my new fanless computer, this jetway got 2 Realtek RTL811EVL PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet LAN
You can check my thread here : http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,66464.msg363431.html

I just tried your driver with 2.1 i386 and at first boot i got an ip for my WAN ;-)

Thanks a lot !

NeverSimple

Glad it was at least useful to someone… :)

I'm still having problems with pfSense using the Realtek 8111G NIC's. Little more work to do, I guess.

I really wished Shuttle made these devices with Intel NIC's. They are so great for a pfSense home router. Wouldn't care if that increased the price somewhat.

Just curious: I assume you used the FreeBSD 8.3P11-i386 module from the last post? Because I forgot to mention the equivalent pfSense version; I guess that's easy enough to find though.

Just in case someone might want to know:

pfSense 2.1 is based on FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p11
pfSense 2.03 is based on FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p13

Anyway, good luck with your router!

Richard

Guldil

@NeverSimple:

Just curious: I assume you used the FreeBSD 8.3P11-i386 module from the last post? Because I forgot to mention the equivalent pfSense version; I guess that's easy enough to find though.

Yes i knew that pfsense 2.1 is based on 8.3 and pfsense 2.0 based on 8.1.

And before i saw your message, i was testing some if_re.ko found on this forum.

My question : what will happen when a new version comes out ?
And can the developper of pfsense use the offcial 1.83 module of realtek ?

stephenw10

pfSense is built on the FreeBSD code base. If Realtek, or whoever, submit their code or patches into FreeBSD it will get included in pfSense 2.2 which is expected to be based on FreeBSD 10.
It's hard to say quite what the source code on Realteks site is. It's clearly the same code as FreeBSD are using but comparing it with the FreeBSD re(4) source it looks old but it's been patched to support newer cards. :-\

Steve

Guldil

and if we have a new version of pfsense, still in 2.1 branch ?

stephenw10

Typically they would be for bug fixes or security fixes but drivers have been backported before to support newer hardware. If would require specific work to produce the patches though, it's unlikely updated freebsd drivers would be included automatically.

Steve

Guldil

so if my router is stable with this driver i can safely put it in production ? i will just have to test the new pfsense 2.2 !

great news :)

stephenw10

Only you can make that decision. ;)
If you have thoroughly tested it and found it to be stable then it will probably be OK. Of course it will probably be subject to conditions in production that you haven't tested, that's just how it goes. BY running code that isn't part of the default pfSense install you don't get the benefit of thousands of other people testing it in production.

Steve

Guldil

i'm understantding but there is no warranty at all with pfsense except if you buy a specific hardware.
With i386 / amd64 installed on PC, there are a lot of components which can cause instability or errors so…

I'll test it for a long time at my work, i'll see if it's stable or not :)

kejianshi

Thats a simple problem to avoid. Use hardware that is 2 - 3 years old and that is known to work well with pfsense with no special tweaking.

When people buy the latest and greatest, usually, they are cutting their own throat. PFsense is not windows 7.

When shopping for pfsense hardware, unless you love tinkering buy known-to-work hassle free hardware with recommended NICs.

Guldil

i know that…

But i was looking for cheaper hardware for pfsense.
I have anothers pfsense router, certified, for 800 € !

This one cost only 350€ and i have more functionnality (Wifi, 64 Gb SSD, Fanless, Atom).

Sometime it's good to test ;-)

kejianshi

I have Atom based systems out there and at home I use an old AMD X2. I prefer the AMD. It seems to do everything better, faster easier more stable. Seems the only place it doesn't work better than the Atom boxes is power consumption.

If you just need one, I'd say use a older, relatively low power desktop box you recycled.

If you need a bunch of them running, the the power becomes a factor. (for me anyway).

tguldener

Great news:

FYI: Fixed in r257304-257306.

So for the next Version of PFSense I hope the Card will be also supported. At the moment I working with 4 DS47 with customized driver and everything will working perfectly - also with all my VLAN implementation.

g.
thomas

NeverSimple

Hello Thomas,

Very interesting!. What exactly are you working with on the DS47's? With FreeBSD or pfSense? Did you make kernel modules or are you using a FreeBSD version with these changes already applied? (10 or maybe even 11).

If I look through the source code, as far as I can tell, the 8011G is treated exactly like the F, which is already in FreeBSD 8.3. The only thing changed, seems to be that the hardware revision is added to 'if_rlreg.h' and a few lines in 'if_re.c' to get the 'G' treated exactly like the already implemented 'F'.
I tried that approach some time ago, when these changes started appearing on the internet. I took the the FreeBSD 8.3 source code for the Realtek NIC's and modified those files in exactly the same way as in the source code you mention in your post. Build kernel modules with it and used those.

That didn't work at all… :-\ The NIC's were recognized during boot and when doing an 'ifconfig', if the NIC had a network connection, it was marked as 'UP'. After that nothing seem to happen. DHCP did not work and manually assigning an address to the NIC did seem to work, but no traffic would flow in or out of it. No error messages of any sort, it just did nothing.
I couldn't find out what was wrong with it and eventually gave up. Having a network card (or two) that refuse to move any network traffic seems rather pointless... :(

I'm now using the DS47 with some Linux distro... works fine, but who wants to use Linux if FreeBSD/pfSense is a possibility? ;)

So I'm glad (and a little confused) that it seems to work fine with you. It wouldn't surprise me if I did something wrong, but applying these changes did not seem too difficult. Who knows?

I would appreciate it if you could give some details on how your setup works.

Richard

compdoc

I have an ECS KBN-I/2100 motherboard which has an on-board Realtek nic, and I added a SYBA SY-PEX24028 dual-port Realtek gigabit card to have LAN, WAN, and Wi-Fi ports. But pfSense 2.1 would not work with these nics until I found your driver. Thank you very much! Its only been a couple of weeks in use on my own network, but they run smoothly with no issues so I'll be using them in a production machine being sold to a customer.

Until now I had a heck of a time making the nics work. I even tried installing the latest release of Freebsd to see if I could grab a working driver and install it into pfSense, but the newest Freebsd would not recognize the nics.

One solution was to install Ubuntu Server and run pfSense in a KVM virtual machine on the box. pfSense has no problems with the virtual nics available in KVM, however there was a performance penalty running on this 1 GHz dual-core processor.

What I like about these new, (relatively) fast AMD Kabini cpus is that they include AES-256 support, while the current low watt Intel Atoms and Celerons do not. (But there are new Atoms being released that do have AES)

Anyway, thanks again for the drivers!

That updated driver is unlikely to make 2.1.1 or 2.2.

Maybe 2.2.1.

stephenw10

Support (at least prelimenary) was added to the re(4) driver in FreeBSD 10.

http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/10.0.0/sys/dev/re/if_re.c?revision=257615&view=markup

I assume that will be in 2.2?

Steve

Panoptic

I was able to compile a working AMD64 module for the 8111G. I just downloaded the latest source code from realtek and compiled on freebsd 8.3. Tested with great results on the Shuttle DS47 both ports functional.

Attached is the compiled module. It is a zip file with a .txt extension. Just rename to .zip and extract the module in /boot/modules

Add the following code to /boot/loader.conf.local (create the file if it does not exist!) I had to use a USB ethernet controller to get past the initial boot process and copy the module.```
if_re_load="YES"


[if_re.txt](/public/_imported_attachments_/1/if_re.txt)

compdoc

I started looking at the file sizes of the drivers compiled and shared here in this forum as well as others shared online, and I noticed they kept getting larger and larger. So, i decided to try compiling the driver myself on my KBN-I/2100 board. Its an x86_64 cpu, and I have pfSense 2.1-RELEASE (amd64) installed. It turns out mine is slightly larger than the others here, but it works well and I'll include it in case it helps someone.

To compile, first I installed freeBSD 8.3 and then fetched and installed all updates, which brought the OS to FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p14. I assume there's a way to limit the release to p11, but a quick search didn't tell me. Doesn't seem to be a problem, and hopefully someone reading this can let me know if it is.

Following the instructions included with the driver source from Realtek, (version 1.84, dated 2014/3/4) I compiled the driver and copied the file 'if_re.ko' to /boot/kernel/. I also modified /boot/loader.conf.local to contain if_re_load="YES" as mentioned in previous posts. And I made sure that the file was marked executable and matched the permissions of the other drivers in the folder.

Rename the attached file to if_re.zip to extract the driver.

Notes: 1) Looks like you should actually place the driver in /boot/modules instead, but this works too.

There's a typo in the Makefile that prevents 'make install' from finishing. You have to change the word kldx[1~ref to kldxref
After compiling and installing if_re.ko on the FreeBSD test machine, DHCP stops working until you change the file /etc/rc.conf. Change the line: ifconfig_re0="DHCP" to: ifconfig_re0="SYNCDHCP". However, this change isn't necessary in pfSense

if_re.txt

ndeppe

Thanks, compdoc! I just put together a machine using an ECS H87H3-M3(1.0) motherboard with a RealTek 8111G onboard NIC. I was able to get this working using your files. Well, at least it is recognized now. I still have to test with a real live connection.