Re: Which network driver for RTL8211 or 8201 NIC's?
On Thursday 20 January 2011, Pyun YongHyeon wrote: On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 11:54:54PM +, b. f. wrote: Mike Clarke wrote: I need to replace a failing motherboard. I'm aiming to keep the existing Athlon CPU so I'm tied down to to a socket AM2(+) board and the majority of those available seem to have nForce 630a chipsets and RTL8211CL or 8201EL NIC's which aren't explicitly mentioned in the release notes http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html#ETHERNET. I see that the strings RTL8211C(L) and RTL8201L (but not EL) appear in /usr/src/sys/dev/rgephy.c and rlphy.c but the man page for the rl driver only mentions RealTek 8129/8139 and I'm not sure which driver is built from rgephy.c. Am I going to have problems if I get a motherboard with one of these NIC's? It's a bit confusing, because there are product numbers associated with NICs, and with different individual component chipsets, and some Correct. Identifying exact model number is the one of hardest thing in Realtek controllers. I think RTL8211CL or 8201EL are not MAC controller but the PHY model name. These PHY are supported by rlphy(4) since they are not gigabit PHY(e.g. Fast Ethernet). I recently found someone with a motherboard with the same chipset in a Windows PC and was able to experiment with it by booting off a FreeBSD install CD to confirm that the RTL8211CL was recognised. So I went ahead and bought my new motherboard (Gigabyte GA-M68M-S2P) and things are working fine. According to the specs the RTL8211CL is Fast Ethernet, claiming 10/100/1000 Mb/sec. I'm only using 100Mb/sec so can't confirm the 1000Mb capability. In case the information is of use to anyone, here's an extract from dmesg: nfe0: NVIDIA nForce MCP61 Networking Adapter port 0xec00-0xec07 mem 0xfe02d000-0xfe02dfff irq 20 at device 7.0 on pci0 miibus0: MII bus on nfe0 rgephy0: RTL8169S/8110S/8211B media interface PHY 3 on miibus0 rgephy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-FDX, auto nfe0: Ethernet address: 6c:f0:49:9e:88:97 nfe0: [FILTER] ... and pciconf -lv nfe0@pci0:0:7:0:class=0x068000 card=0xe0001458 chip=0x03ef10de rev=0xa2 hdr=0x00 vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation' device = 'Nvidia Networking Card (nForce 405)' class = bridge -- Mike Clarke ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Which network driver for RTL8211 or 8201 NIC's?
Mike Clarke wrote: I need to replace a failing motherboard. I'm aiming to keep the existing Athlon CPU so I'm tied down to to a socket AM2(+) board and the majority of those available seem to have nForce 630a chipsets and RTL8211CL or 8201EL NIC's which aren't explicitly mentioned in the release notes http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html#ETHERNET. I see that the strings RTL8211C(L) and RTL8201L (but not EL) appear in /usr/src/sys/dev/rgephy.c and rlphy.c but the man page for the rl driver only mentions RealTek 8129/8139 and I'm not sure which driver is built from rgephy.c. Am I going to have problems if I get a motherboard with one of these NIC's? It's a bit confusing, because there are product numbers associated with NICs, and with different individual component chipsets, and some code is shared. Pyun YongHyeon, who has been working on the re(4) and rl(4) drivers in -CURRENT and -STABLE recently, could probably tell you more (I've cc'ed him). b. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Which network driver for RTL8211 or 8201 NIC's?
On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 11:54:54PM +, b. f. wrote: Mike Clarke wrote: I need to replace a failing motherboard. I'm aiming to keep the existing Athlon CPU so I'm tied down to to a socket AM2(+) board and the majority of those available seem to have nForce 630a chipsets and RTL8211CL or 8201EL NIC's which aren't explicitly mentioned in the release notes http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html#ETHERNET. I see that the strings RTL8211C(L) and RTL8201L (but not EL) appear in /usr/src/sys/dev/rgephy.c and rlphy.c but the man page for the rl driver only mentions RealTek 8129/8139 and I'm not sure which driver is built from rgephy.c. Am I going to have problems if I get a motherboard with one of these NIC's? It's a bit confusing, because there are product numbers associated with NICs, and with different individual component chipsets, and some Correct. Identifying exact model number is the one of hardest thing in Realtek controllers. I think RTL8211CL or 8201EL are not MAC controller but the PHY model name. These PHY are supported by rlphy(4) since they are not gigabit PHY(e.g. Fast Ethernet). code is shared. Pyun YongHyeon, who has been working on the re(4) and rl(4) drivers in -CURRENT and -STABLE recently, could probably tell you more (I've cc'ed him). All Realtek controllers are supported so I think you don't have to worry about that. Very recent controller like RTL8105 is not supported yet but it would be done in near future. b. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Which network driver for RTL8211 or 8201 NIC's?
-Original Message- From: Mike Clarke [mailto:jmc-freeb...@milibyte.co.uk] Sent: 22 December 2010 21:46 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Which network driver for RTL8211 or 8201 NIC's? I need to replace a failing motherboard. I'm aiming to keep the existing Athlon CPU so I'm tied down to to a socket AM2(+) board and the majority of those available seem to have nForce 630a chipsets and RTL8211CL or 8201EL NIC's which aren't explicitly mentioned in the release notes http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html#ETHERNET. I see that the strings RTL8211C(L) and RTL8201L (but not EL) appear in /usr/src/sys/dev/rgephy.c and rlphy.c but the man page for the rl driver only mentions RealTek 8129/8139 and I'm not sure which driver is built from rgephy.c. Am I going to have problems if I get a motherboard with one of these NIC's? -- Mike Clarke ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org I have an am2+ board in a machine with a realtek card and it is using the re driver, might be worth having a look there. Regards Graeme ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
