Realtek NIC Question
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I know that Realtek NICs won't be as good as Intel or Broadcom NICs. But would an Intel N95-based mini computer with an RTL8125 and an RTL8168 be able to handle a residential gigabit-class connection with a few VLANs on the RTL8125 side? Right now I have a Lenovo desktop and I'm looking to reduce the physical size of my router while not spending a whole lot of money if I can avoid it.
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Realtek and Broadcom NICs are not well supported in FreeBSD. Plenty of Mini-PC appliances with Intel NICs
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It would probably work fine.
You need the alternative Realtek kmod pkg driver to support the 2.5G 8125 NICs though.
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$120 is a lot easier to swallow than $500, although the $500 is for something with Intel i226-V NICs.
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@shaunmccloud said in Realtek NIC Question:
with an RTL8125 and an RTL8168 be able to handle ...
Normally, just to be safe, stay away from 'realtek' NICs and you'll be fine.
This doesn't mean these NICs are bad or something like that. If they really were, they wouldn't exist anymore.
IMHO : Realtek stuff is build for the market that brings in the big $$$ (€€€ ), so, for the end user devices like desktops, portables etc. They have a 'good enough "Microsoft Windows" driver so all is well.
Remember : FreeBSD is open source market, doesn't bring any $$$ in the pocket, so, they don't bother.
Others have to build the driver. And others are people like you and me.
Have a look at the technical specifications and manuals of these realtek chips, NIC driver are still today 'hard core' assembly coding (noop, no Java, no Pythoin .... but arm or i386-64 ) exercises.
Manuals are of course written Chinees, Or Korean, or a language like that.So, again, just to be on the safe side :
If your device runs something else as Windows 11, a question like :
Will my USB Wifi dongle work ?
Will my Realtek NIC work ?
Will my printer work ?
Will whatever other device work ?
becomes very important.
Guess what : pfSense doesn't use a Microsoft kernel ^^Even worse, pfSense doesn't use a Linux based OS, but the far less used known "FreeBSD" OS.
And pfSense needs a CPU that is supported and some NICs that are supported.
And nothing else.So, "go for Intel" is a simple phrase, I know, and totally not fair to the Realtek brand, but things are as there are : we are still waiting for the guy that takes up the massive task to write a good driver for FreeBSD 13... no wait FreeBSD 14.x, (pfSense 2.7.2) .... and also FreeBSD 15.0 (pFsense 24.03).
I repeat : these are my words. My way of viewing things. Not an "attack" on Realtek, neither on the open source community.
Btw : Actually, there is a guy that has put a lot of efforts into writing a better driver : look around in this forum, there is a FreeBSD package that you can install on the command line ( !! ) that support better the/some reaktek NICs. Better as the build in FreeBSD original realtek driver.
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I will say that a lot of the bad rep Realtek NICs have is left over from their older 10/100M chips that were truly terrible. The 1G NICs were much better, but that's not saying much. The 2.5G 8125 seems OK from my limited testing.
Still amusing
https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-src/blob/devel-main/sys/dev/rl/if_rl.c#L46
