Hi all, Thanks to flo for notifying me that there's an alternative to net/realtek-re-kmod.
I've had crashes running realtek-re-kmod and realtek-re-kmod198 before, none of the switches seemed to help. After upgrading to from 14.3 to 15.0-RC4-p1, I thought I'd test again. So far so good, no crashes. Generating load with iperf for 5 minutes from 2 machines to the server works OK with the 1101.00 for now. Nice to have this if_rge in the back pocket when things don't work out with 1101.00. Started porting it, find the patch at https://brnrd.eu/bsd/patch-net_realtek-rge-kmod-20251129 Seeing that this is supposed to land in base, I'm holding back on committing it. Thanks all! Bernard (brnrd@) On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 5:48 PM Adrian Chadd <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, 27 Nov 2025 at 10:13, Florian Smeets <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On 23.11.25 03:16, Adrian Chadd wrote: > > > hi! > > > > > > i've ported Kevin Lo's openbsd driver for these realtek chipsets to > > > FreeBSD. > > > It works well enough for me to use on my laptop w/ RTL8125B / Killer > > > E3000. > > > I'm now opening it up to others who are willing to build/run a kernel > > > module to test the driver out and report back. > > > > > This is great. Finally, an in tree driver for these very common NICs. > > The 1100.00 version of the net/realtek-re-kmod was just unreliable for > > me (constant hangs, no matter which options I turned off and on). I've > > only done light testing with the official 1101.00 driver. I was able to > > wedge it with less than a minute of iperf3, and the ifconfig down/up > > dance that was able to revive the interface with 1100.00 was not able to > > recover the interface. > > > > I ran if_rge on my NAS and did some testing. I haven't had one hang with > > this driver, even after pounding the network for hours. That's a big > > plus for me. Thanks. > > > > I was able to achieve close to 2.5Gb/s TX and close to 1Gb/s RX with > > iperf3 --bidir. > > > > CPU usage appears to be substantially higher than with the official > > Realtek driver. > > That's a good data point. > > > > > [intr{irq59: rge0}] goes to around 50% of one core, and [kernel{rge0 > > taskq thread}] hovers between 20-25% when running the above iperf3 tests. > > > > With the official 1101.00 driver, the only process using > 1% CPU is > > this one [kernel{re0 taskq}] and it is around 10% with the test > > mentioned above. > > I'll go dig into that a bit. It shouldn't be taking very much CPU to process > this number of packets; the bulk of the CPU should be used by the IP stack. > > I'll go run some profiling over the next few days and see if I can nail down > what I'm doing poorly. Hopefully it's something stupid on my end. ;-) > > > > -adrian >
