Realtek NICs?

[ThreeDee]

I know Realtek nics are frowned upon ..but are the drivers any better in TrueNAS 12?

 

[ornias]

Did you do your own research?

Folks all over the internet are still patching their realtek drivers on FreeBSD 12, I think that would answer your question quite well?

 

[ThreeDee]

I found 1 guy manually patched his Realtek drivers with version 1.95 on FreeNAS 11.2 .. I should have searched for FreeBSD 12 I guess.

..and yes I have been google'n for a few hours now and generally do so to try and avoid responses like yours

 

[Yorick]

What I am curious about: Given that code exists that works better than what’s shipping, what keeps the FreeBSD driver team from using it? There has to be a good reason, given how long re(4) has been in this state. Looking at the mailing lists and various discussions showed me people compiling the Realtek code, but I haven’t found anything that explains why that code isn’t or can’t be used in FreeBSD out of the box.

 

[artlessknave]

what keeps the FreeBSD driver team from using it?

convention most likely, combined with trust issues.
realtek has a rep for not having the most stable NICs, and devs don't wanna waste their (often free) time fixing things that work intermittently, leaving mucking about with non standard configs to people who have sufficient ability to ignore recommendations.
if the freebsd community was as expansive as linux, it might be different, but withous zerg hives worth of devs they will pick and choose hardware they believe is worth their time. it's the same reason these forums highly recomend server grade gear.

 

[CrimsonMars]

this drivers worked for me, I used 12.0, ver 1.96.04, just coppy it to /boot/kernel/if_re.ko, "chmod 555 /boot/kernel/if_re.ko", and then load it under System->Tunables.

 

[ThreeDee]

this drivers worked for me, I used 12.0, ver 1.96.04, just coppy it to /boot/kernel/if_re.ko, "chmod 555 /boot/kernel/if_re.ko", and then load it under System->Tunables.

View attachment 40943

how's your network throughput using it?

 

[CrimsonMars]

Well do not fully know as I only use this for management and sole lightweight back-ups and stuff, I use 10G cards for real trafic, just sent 100G+ back-ups over the interface and trafic looks like this:

this is to a pool running dedup and compression and some vm´s

 

[CrimsonMars]

Main thing is that the interface does not lock up anymore when pushing traffic over it as it was driving me crazy.
The copy was done by Veeam from one pool to another, and pool max sync write is around 140MB/s(due to crappy optane on the SLOG, will replace in the near future) not counting dedup overhead.

 

[SirNomad49]

Hello @CrimsonMars,
I was facing the same issue with my homemade build. and replaced it with 1.96.04 andit looks like the nic is stable now and not locking up any more.

 

[bmartin13]

Found a simple fix for this if you are running the version 12.

from console / SSH:

nano /boot/loader.conf
add line: if_re_load="YES"

save, reboot appliance

this enables the freeBSD realtek driver at boot:

re(4)

www.freebsd.org

 

[jgreco]

Found a simple fix for this if you are running the version 12.

from console / SSH:

nano /boot/loader.conf
add line: if_re_load="YES"

save, reboot appliance

this enables the freeBSD realtek driver at boot:

re(4)

www.freebsd.org

That's incorrect. You need to do this through tunables, or it won't survive.

Everyone knows there's a crappy re driver included. It's gotten better, I guess, but this thread is really about people trying to mash in drivers that actually work for their particular cards.