R8101 driver link issue

R8101 driver link issue

[Switact - Thomas Roes]

L.S.

I'm using linux primaliry through Novell ZEN as part of it's imaging 
system. A "standard" problem is arrival of new network cards. Procedures 
to add new drivers to the boot image are well documented.

Recently I got problems with a new motherbord using the Realtek RTL8101E 
PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller.

This card is recognised by the r8169 driver but.... it always gives me 
"link down".

To troubleshoot this issue I installed SLED10SP1 on such a machine, 
which uses the same kernel as the ZEN imaging environment.

So i searched for drivers to compile and came across the 
r8101-1.006.tar.bz2 driver.

-1 To get this driver compiled, I have to edit the source at line 3273:
u32 mss = skb_shinfo(skb)->tso_size;
replace
tso_size -> gso_size (or simply removing the if else endif construction 
altogether :-)

-2 but unfortunately, also this new driver, although it get's loaded, it 
still reports (ethtool eth0)....
current message level : 0x0..033 (51)
Link detected : no


I hope I'm writing to the right person to help solve this issue

This link detection issue seems to trouble realtek drivers for a long time.

-- 
Thomas Roes
Switact
Kvk: Leiden 28100283

Re: R8101 driver link issue

[Francois Romieu]

Switact - Thomas Roes <info@switact.nl> :
[...]
> Recently I got problems with a new motherbord using the Realtek RTL8101E 
> PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller.
>
> This card is recognised by the r8169 driver but.... it always gives me 
> "link down".

Can you send the output of 'lspci -vvxxx' and the dmesg of a recent kernel ?

It should include a line like this one:
[...]
eth0: RTL8168b/8111b at 0xf8920000, 00:13:8f:ea:b1:5d, XID 38000000 IRQ 221
                                                       ^^^
[...]
> So i searched for drivers to compile and came across the 
> r8101-1.006.tar.bz2 driver.

Ok.

[...]
> -2 but unfortunately, also this new driver, although it get's loaded, it 
> still reports (ethtool eth0)....
> current message level : 0x0..033 (51)
> Link detected : no

Can you send the output of mii-diag and try so force a reset with this
driver ?

-- 
Ueimor