Official Realtek Driver Binary 1.95 For 2.4.4 Release

TheNarc

@knnniggett I'm glad to hear the driver has been useful. I'm sorry to hear about the LAN interface flakiness; that's not something I've seen (yet) in on the two CI323s I run. With regard to your questions:

I would not recommend re-enabling hardware offloading. I believe that Realtek claims to support it, but from what I understand it can be prone to bugginess and you're unlikely to see any tangible benefit from it. Also, it's the sort of thing that (I think) you wouldn't necessarily know right away if it works. So you might try it and it would seem fine, but some time down the line you'd have a problem and, if you're anything like me, probably forget that you'd changed that setting a while back and not immediately realize that it's related.

As for the loader.conf.local entries, at least based on my experience it should be fine to get rid of them. I don't have them set on either of my boxes right now and haven't had any issues.

Napsterbater

@knnniggett said in Official Realtek Driver Binary 1.95 For 2.4.4 Release:

I've had three Zotac CI32x boxes deployed, running pfsense for a few years now, and I had not run into the dreaded watchdog timeout error until after upgrading to pfSense 2.4.4. Now the lan interface of two out of three boxes goes silent about once a month. Fortunately, since it it is the lan interface, I just reboot them remotely.

Thanks for doing the work building this driver. This saved me quite a bit of time.

Question:
With this new driver, can/should I re-enable hardware offloading under Advanced-> Networking?

I've also got the following set in loader.conf.local. These were suggested as workarounds in another thread. Is it safe to remove these?
hw.re.msi_disable=1
hw.pci.enable_msix=0
hw.pci.enable_msi=0

I do not have these anymore either with the new driver.

Should be good to remove.

fromage9747

I made myself a new router after my previous one failed(power supply fried).

I got myself a GIGABYTE GA-N3160N-D3V motherboard with an embedded CPU and DUAL NIC's perfect for making a nice small compact router with pfsense. Everything was hunky-dory for a few months with no issues until one day I started encountering this "watchdog timeout" issue.

I thought that the CPU had overheated and bent the solder like how the Xbox 360 did with the RROD. The CPU was only at 65 degrees Celcius...

I installed fans in the case and ensured that the temp never grew past 40 degrees Celcius. The issue still persisted and I thought I would now need to RMA the board.

As I cannot go without internet for longer periods of time due to working from home I needed to get my original pfsense router up and running before sending this board in.

Whilst in the process of doing so I was doing some uploading of work to Jira when one gif file would repeatedly kill the router. I was stunned, how on earth could a 2mb file kill the router?!?!?!

I thought I would do one last search online to see if I could find anything software related that might be the issue and I stumbled upon this thread.

I can confirm that applying the Realtek driver has now solved my issue!

Thank you!

Zcool31

I just ran into a situation similar to @fromage9747, but with a cheapo mini-pc that has two realtec nics of the type discussed above. Worked fine for months, but today watchdog timer started timing out every few minutes. After updating the driver, it hasn't happened yet.

I followed this post:

https://forum.netgate.com/post/799000

bedpan

@Zcool31

Exact same thing... Just updated. We will see what happens..

Thanks all!

fromage9747

@Zcool31 @bedpan Going onto two weeks now without another watchdog timeout. Pretty confident the issue is fixed. But dam, what a pesky issue! I was going to RMA the board. Good thing I didn't!

bedpan

@fromage9747
Thanks for the followup. Nice to know this is likely dealt with.. A few hours now and problem free.

Napsterbater

Just for confirmations is anybody upgraded to 2.4.5 with FreeBSD 11.3?

Any issues or should it be good to go?

Turfrider

@Napsterbater Did you take the leap and try 2.4.5 with this driver?

TheNarc

Full disclosure: I have not yet tested this and do not know if it is necessary, but I did recompile the v1.95 Realtek driver under FreeBSD 11.3. I'm planning to test it on my pfSense machines within the next day or two and will report back.
if_re_ko_v195_FREEBSD-11.3_64bit.zip

TheNarc

Installed the driver I attached to my previous post w. 2.4.5 and all is well so far . . . will report back if anything goes sideways.

Napsterbater

@TheNarc said in Official Realtek Driver Binary 1.95 For 2.4.4 Release:

Full disclosure: I have not yet tested this and do not know if it is necessary, but I did recompile the v1.95 Realtek driver under FreeBSD 11.3. I'm planning to test it on my pfSense machines within the next day or two and will report back.
if_re_ko_v195_FREEBSD-11.3_64bit.zip

Install this updated driver on one box and then updated to 2.4.5, its booted and running. So far so good.

Napsterbater

@Derelict said in Official Realtek Driver Binary 1.95 For 2.4.4 Release:

/boot/loader.conf.local

Also note after upgrade run "kldstat" to confirm if_re.ko loaded.

If not make sure you have

if_re_load="YES"

in /boot/loader.conf.local NOT /boot/loader.conf as /boot/loader.conf is overwritten on upgrade.

coreybrett

Has anyone had trouble with RTL810xE chipsets? Would this driver cover those?

Napsterbater

@coreybrett from what I can tell. This driver should work with it.

But worst case be ready to edit the loader.conf.local from the console and remove the reference to it just in case..

stephenw10

Yes, there's only one driver, re(4), for all the Realtek Gigabit NICs. It should work for that.

Are you actually seeing issues though? I would only use the alternative driver if you are.

Steve

Napsterbater

@stephenw10 to be clear that model is a fast ethernet not a gigabit. If that makes a difference.

stephenw10

Ah, been a while since I saw one of those. It's listed as supported by re(4) though so it's probably good.
Though I would recommend not using it at all if there is any other option. The Realtek 100M NICs were terrible.
I hope it's better than the rtl8139: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/dev/rl/if_rl.c#L48

Steve

wkn

Compiled on FreeBSD 11.3-STABLE (last):

if_re.zip

whosmatt

@coreybrett

I have a bunch of HP motherboards that have them:

re0@pci0:3:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x2b05103c chip=0x813610ec rev=0x07 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

I don't currently use this interface with my pfSense box but I did for a while and it was fine with the driver that ships with pfSense. By "fine" I mean it wasn't obviously broken in any way.