Hi,

I'm having some trouble with r8169 and Linux kernel 2.6.15.1 getting my 
Realtek 8169 ethernet controller to work. This is the gigabit 
ethernet-capable embedded version which is integrated into a Foxconn 
925A01-8EKRS2 motherboard.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post, so I apologise if this 
is more appropriate to linux-kernel.

Whenever the system boots, the r8169 driver does not pick up the MAC
address for the card; it reports the MAC addrress as being
FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF. (I have also tried various 2.6.12, 2.6.13, 2.6.14
kernels with the same experience). My first thought was "broken chip", 
but this box has similar issues with other network cards which I'll 
mention later.

When I run ifconfig, this reports:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
              inet addr:192.168.0.9  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
              UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
              RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:4294967290 overruns:0 frame:0
              TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
              collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
              RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
              Interrupt:21 Base address:0x4800

The IP address has been assigned statically in /etc/network/interfaces
as I don't use DHCP (and I doubt DHCP would currently work anyway). If I
try to use "ifconfig eth0 hw ether" to set the MAC address then ifconfig
just hangs.

I am unable to ping anywhere in my network or beyond the gateway, nor
can I establish any network connections to any other machine. Given that
there appears to be something wrong at the link layer, I wouldn't expect
higher layer diagnostics to reveal much, but I figured it was worth a try.

In addition, my system tends to hang at the "deconfiguring network
interfaces" stage of system shutdown.

I have tried building the r8169 module both with and without gigabit
ethernet support and using MMIO versus PIO - no luck.

 From browsing around the web, some people suggest changing the Plug and
Play OS setting in the BIOS, only my BIOS doesn't appear to have any
such setting. The only option in the PNP area was to reset the ESCD
data, so I tried this to see if that would help, but still the issue
persisted.

Some reports seemed to suggest an issue with IRQ assignment and ACPI,
so I tried booting with kernel options including nolapic, acpi=off,
acpi=noirq, pci=noacpi and various combinations of these. None of them
worked (in fact nolapic hangs my system during boot-up).

I include the output from lspci -vvv and dmesg so you can see what is
happening. I also used Donald Becker's rtl8169-diag program, but that
complained that "A recognized chip has been found, but it does not
appear to exist in I/O space".

Incidentally, I tried some known good 3Com and D-Link network cards in
this machine (both with and without the Realtek enabled in the BIOS) and
I couldn't get them to work either for similar reasons. If it were just
the Realtek I might assume it was a defective chip, but the lack of
ability to get any network card working on this machine suggests a
deeper issue.

I'm happy to try testing new patches or settings, but would appreciate
some tips on what to do next. In all other respects my system is happy
and stable, it just lacks a working network connection.

Thanks in advance

Andrew