Re: Unusable Realtek NIC after upgrading to NetBSD 9

[Rocky Hotas <rockyhotas%post.com@localhost>]

Hello Valery,

> Sent: Friday, September 11, 2020 at 9:37 PM
> From: "Valery Ushakov" <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>
> To: netbsd-users%netbsd.org@localhost
> Subject: Re: Unusable Realtek NIC after upgrading to NetBSD 9
...
> Data point.  I had something that looked similar enough to this with
> my USL-5p (landisk)
>
> re0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0: RealTek 8139C+ 10/100BaseTX (rev. 0x20)
> re0: interrupting at irq 5
> re0: Ethernet address 00:a0:b0:65:15:6c
> re0: using 64 tx descriptors
> rlphy0 at re0 phy 0: Realtek internal PHY
> rlphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
>
> It was mostly sitting idle then one day it popped this watchdog
> timeout and lost its network iirc.

Thanks for sharing the behaviour of your card. I don't know it, but the
re(4) and rlphy(4) drivers are the same as mine.

> So, I'd try with booting a current'ish kernel on your machine.  Enough
> compat is enabled by default in GENERIC, so you can just drop in
> current as netbsd.new and boot it one off manually with the existing
> 9.0 install.

This is a great advice, which saves a lot of time. I did as suggested.
I updated the current source and built the kernel, then I selected `3' in
the boot menu to access the boot prompt and wrote `boot netbsd.new'.
It is NetBSD 9.99.72.

Things got even worse in this case:

[     1.004075] re0 at pci3 dev 0 function 0: RealTek 8100E/8101E/8102E/8102EL PCIe 10/100BaseTX (rev. 0x05)
[     1.004075] re0: interrupting at msix3 vec 0
[     1.004075] re0: reset never completed!
[     1.004075] re0: Ethernet address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
[     1.004075] re0: using 256 tx descriptors
[     1.004075] ifmedia_set: no match for 0x20/0xfffffff
...
[     7.727294] entropy: ready
[     8.174418] re0: reset never completed!
[     8.194411] re0: reset never completed!
...
[    19.964983] re0: watchdog timeout
[    19.974843] re0: reset never completed!


re0: flags=0x8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        capabilities=3f80<TSO4,IP4CSUM_Rx,IP4CSUM_Tx,TCP4CSUM_Rx,TCP4CSUM_Tx>
        capabilities=3f80<UDP4CSUM_Rx,UDP4CSUM_Tx>
        enabled=0
        ec_capabilities=3<VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>
        ec_enabled=0
        address: ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
        media: Ethernet none (none)
        inet6 fe80::a3e:8eff:fe6a:527a%re0/64 flags 0x0 scopeid 0x1

I also tried to `shutdown -p now' and powered on again (instead of
`shudown -r now') but with no difference.

With the 9.0 formal release the NIC latency is very high, but it
communicates with DNS servers and the internet (though with a 10 s Google
ping). In this case, instead, with the unusual ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff MAC
address, the NIC card doesn't work at all.

This is IIRC the 4th bad experience with a NIC on NetBSD and, at least
as regards the issues I encountered, with -current (instead of the
formal release) the issue was never solved or mitigated. Maybe this is
due to some modifications in PCI or in the driver file, starting from
NetBSD-9.0, which are permanently now in the code, also in newer
versions.

Rocky