Realtek device driver update
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After much struggle I was able to stabilize one of our most troublesome boxes running 2.4.1. (It would basically crash overnight pretty much every night and I would find it either with a frozen or blank screen every morning)
The biggest problem turned out to be the Realtek device driver.
The solution was described in this thread https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=103841.msg754411
Basically replacing the driver to version 1.94 did the trick.We may need to do the same on many more boxes as we have an awful lot of Realtek 8111 and 8118 based machines.
My question is regarding how this is going to affect future upgrades starting with 2.4.2.
Will the upgrade override this driver and go back to the original distro version. If so, is there a way it can be protected?
Should we expect seeing a distro fix for this driver from pfsense/netgate in the upcoming revs or eventually from freebsd?
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The driver would have to be included in FreeBSD first. They have a bug tracker you can use to track this.
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Just found out that opnsense included 1.94 in their latest release. I guess they are not waiting for freebsd.
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I suppose pfSense won't do that kind of thing since nobody really wants to use Realtek chips, at least not the people that throw time and money at this.
It is possible to package it yourself or have someone else package it outside of the normal tree, but it isn't really best practise to randomly plug in external code in to a security product. -
@johnkeates:
I suppose pfSense won't do that kind of thing since nobody really wants to use Realtek chips, at least not the people that throw time and money at this.
Lots of people want to use realtek chips–they're cheap, readily available, and perform fine on many OSs. But this isn't a community-driven project, and the company behind it has no particular interest in making it easier to run pfsense on cheap, readily available hardware from third parties.
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Driver support is a FreeBSD issue, not pfSense. "perform fine on many OSs" is subjective. I've had to deal with many Realtek NICs over the years and while they may stream Netflix fine, if you try to remotely approach 1Gb speeds, you will seriously hose the computer. The best Realtek I've seen managed to get my Intel i5 quad core to about 70% cpu(90k interrupts per second) usage while only peaking about 1.4Gb/s. Compare that to my Intel i210 NICs that are getting 1.9Gb/s+ while hanging out around 1-5% cpu(3k interrupts per second). These tests were done in Windows where Realtek has the best driver support.
It's crap hardware.
While I sympathize for other's misfortunes, the reality is you get what you pay for. I've done my time making $10 last a week of lunches and dinners in college not many years ago, begging my land lord to wait a bit longer, 3 years without a car. It sucks, I know.
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I've been running successfully with Realtek NICs for a long time now using Realtek's official driver compiled and loaded as a module. While I wouldn't run Realtek on any mission-critical or enterprise applications, imho they're perfectly fine for home use (especially since cost is more often a consideration there). That said, it does take a bit more effort and ymmv. But, getting back on track, in my experience pfSense upgrades have not overridden my Realtek driver with the important exception of major release upgrades (by which I mean upgrades in which pfSense bumps the major release of FreeBSD). I also deliberately have not tried doing that though, because my expectation is that a recompilation of the driver would be needed for new major releases.
For example, when 2.4.0 became available, before upgrading I recompiled the Realtek driver on a FreeBSD 11.1 machine and uploaded it to /boot/kernel/ on my pfSense machine. Then I applied the 2.4.0 pfSense upgrade. And that's all I had to do, if I recall correctly. I don't think the 2.4.0 upgrade even removed the if_re_load="YES" from /boot/loader.conf.local that is needed to use the compiled Realtek driver instead of the one built into the kernel.
I think the main takeaway is that using this compiled Realtek driver is not officially supported by Netgate/pfSense, so it's very much buyer beware. But my experience has been good so far, and I think it's reasonable to assume - though there's no guarantee - that the current v1.94 Realtek driver which I compiled under FreeBSD 11.1 should work for all FreeBSD 11.x releases, but that a recompilation will be required for the first version of pfSense based on FreeBSD 12.x.
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Driver support is a FreeBSD issue, not pfSense. "perform fine on many OSs" is subjective. I've had to deal with many Realtek NICs over the years and while they may stream Netflix fine, if you try to remotely approach 1Gb speeds, you will seriously hose the computer. The best Realtek I've seen managed to get my Intel i5 quad core to about 70% cpu(90k interrupts per second) usage while only peaking about 1.4Gb/s. Compare that to my Intel i210 NICs that are getting 1.9Gb/s+ while hanging out around 1-5% cpu(3k interrupts per second). These tests were done in Windows where Realtek has the best driver support.
Well, that doesn't match my experience. Since "realtek network card" details basically nothing about the chipset in question, I can't comment more than that.
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Driver support is a FreeBSD issue, not pfSense. "perform fine on many OSs" is subjective. I've had to deal with many Realtek NICs over the years and while they may stream Netflix fine, if you try to remotely approach 1Gb speeds, you will seriously hose the computer. The best Realtek I've seen managed to get my Intel i5 quad core to about 70% cpu(90k interrupts per second) usage while only peaking about 1.4Gb/s. Compare that to my Intel i210 NICs that are getting 1.9Gb/s+ while hanging out around 1-5% cpu(3k interrupts per second). These tests were done in Windows where Realtek has the best driver support.
Well, that doesn't match my experience. Since "realtek network card" details basically nothing about the chipset in question, I can't comment more than that.
In my experience the 8169, 8188 and 8111 were all pretty bad under load on Windows, Linux, MacOS and BSD. There are a few more chips but those are the ones that stood out to me. They are of course not as bad as the Nvidia nForce/MCP or Atheros L2 and L1 chips.
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@johnkeates:
Driver support is a FreeBSD issue, not pfSense. "perform fine on many OSs" is subjective. I've had to deal with many Realtek NICs over the years and while they may stream Netflix fine, if you try to remotely approach 1Gb speeds, you will seriously hose the computer. The best Realtek I've seen managed to get my Intel i5 quad core to about 70% cpu(90k interrupts per second) usage while only peaking about 1.4Gb/s. Compare that to my Intel i210 NICs that are getting 1.9Gb/s+ while hanging out around 1-5% cpu(3k interrupts per second). These tests were done in Windows where Realtek has the best driver support.
Well, that doesn't match my experience. Since "realtek network card" details basically nothing about the chipset in question, I can't comment more than that.
In my experience the 8169, 8188 and 8111 were all pretty bad under load on Windows, Linux, MacOS and BSD. There are a few more chips but those are the ones that stood out to me. They are of course not as bad as the Nvidia nForce/MCP or Atheros L2 and L1 chips.
The numbers also don't particularly mean anything (they basically indicate the attachment type). The letters indicate what level of functionality is implemented. It's somewhat opaque, but honestly much easier to get a clear explanation of than intel's naming mess. (Quick: what's the difference between an i219-LM, an i219-V, an i211, an i350, an x520, and an x710? And that's probably about 10% of intel's current part list.)
Just to throw out some actual data, the only rtl I have online at the moment is an 8111G on a N3150 (1.6GHz braswell/atom). It hits about 1.86Gbps with a few hundred interrupts per second on linux–and that interface happens to be a on a software bridge, which probably impacts the performance a bit.
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I think this is for FreeBSD not pfSense to fix.
For whatever reason FreeBSD does not implement the latest realtek driver, which has been shown time and time again to fix issues on realtek hardware (check the FreeBSD forums and mailing lists).
It is possible no one has ever done a PR to get the driver updated, I havent checked that.
Realtek hardware is adequate on windows for home and light business environments,, the issue on FreeBSD is the driver.
If you not willing to update the driver, I highly recommend disabling checksum offloading for realtek hardware to resolve various issues, this doesnt solve everything on realtek but fixes about 90% of observed issues I have seen over the past decade or so. Since realtek has no interrupt moderation feature, one option to also consider is enabling polling, which will moderate the interrupts OS side.
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I think this is for FreeBSD not pfSense to fix.
For whatever reason FreeBSD does not implement the latest realtek driver, which has been shown time and time again to fix issues on realtek hardware (check the FreeBSD forums and mailing lists).
It is possible no one has ever done a PR to get the driver updated, I havent checked that.
Realtek hardware is adequate on windows for home and light business environments,, the issue on FreeBSD is the driver.
If you not willing to update the driver, I highly recommend disabling checksum offloading for realtek hardware to resolve various issues, this doesnt solve everything on realtek but fixes about 90% of observed issues I have seen over the past decade or so. Since realtek has no interrupt moderation feature, one option to also consider is enabling polling, which will moderate the interrupts OS side.
Polling is no longer available in 2.4 as only legacy and broken hardware used to profit from that.
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polling works as I tested it, but yeah I did my own custom kernel with it available and had to be configured in the terminal not GUI.
Thanks for clarifying its no longer officially supported.
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Sorry I updated my reply now as you replied again.
On 2.4.1 and newer tho the pfSense kernel is no longer in a public repo (or at least wasnt a month or so ago) so a custom kernel now no longer is possible, when I enabled it was on 2.4 dev.
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I've been running successfully with Realtek NICs for a long time now using Realtek's official driver compiled and loaded as a module.
@TheNarc: Any chance you would have a step-by-step about how to compile the driver and the tools' setup? I gave a try but ran into lots of warnings and errors and the compilation failed. I might not have had the right compiler. FreeBSD 11.1 continues to be a challenge for me.
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Yeah I'll try to do this when I get a chance. I just want to make sure I can give it the effort it deserves, because there are a good number of steps involved and I won't be doing anyone any favors if I try to slap something together quickly that glosses over or omits certain things :) I've always done it in Virtualbox too, which simplifies some things but complicates others. For example, in my case the path of least resistance for getting the compiled driver off the FreeBSD VM was to SCP it to a Linux machine on the same network running SSH. But that's not going to be the path of least resistance for most setups, probably. Anyway, yes, I will try to remember to do this, it just may not be in the very near future . . .
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For example, when 2.4.0 became available, before upgrading I recompiled the Realtek driver on a FreeBSD 11.1 machine and uploaded it to /boot/kernel/ on my pfSense machine. Then I applied the 2.4.0 pfSense upgrade. And that's all I had to do, if I recall correctly. I don't think the 2.4.0 upgrade even removed the if_re_load="YES" from /boot/loader.conf.local that is needed to use the compiled Realtek driver instead of the one built into the kernel.
I think the main takeaway is that using this compiled Realtek driver is not officially supported by Netgate/pfSense, so it's very much buyer beware. But my experience has been good so far, and I think it's reasonable to assume - though there's no guarantee - that the current v1.94 Realtek driver which I compiled under FreeBSD 11.1 should work for all FreeBSD 11.x releases, but that a recompilation will be required for the first version of pfSense based on FreeBSD 12.x.
Thank you!
Just some thinks to mention, the 1.94 driver you posted works fine with CI327. However, I needed to put in following lines:
hw.pci.enable_msix="1"
hw.re.msi_disable="1"Without msix re1 wouldnt work. No single packet captured from that interface with tcpdump.
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With regard to a write-up on how to compile this Realtek driver, user jovimon made a great one:
https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=103841.msg775568#msg775568Here's a direct link to it as well:
https://gist.github.com/jovimon/524e116471f249626fd2ccd141f3fe05 -
I have an alternate method to install this driver using only your pfSense instance:
- Edit two files using "Diagnostics" > "Edit File":
- /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
- /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/pfSense.conf
ChangeFreeBSD {enabled: no}to#FreeBSD {enabled: no}, this comments out these lines and enables the FreeBSD repository.
- Run the following commands in "Diagnostics" > "Command Prompt":
pkg update -r FreeBSDpkg install -y realtek-re-kmod
- Re-Disable the FreeBSD Repositories (undo the change in step 1), netgate has them disabled for a reason
- Edit /boot/loader.conf.local using "Diagnostics" > "Edit File":
if_re_load="YES" if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko"- Reboot your firewall
- Run
dmesgusing "Diagnostics" > "Command Prompt" and search for your interfaces in the output to verify the version
The RealTek RealTek Driver with some enhancements has made it into the FreeBSD repos.