[Mageia-dev] Sudden problems with r8169 NICs ?

[Thomas Backlund]

Frank Griffin skrev 24.3.2011 15:21:
> On 03/24/2011 08:02 AM, Frank Griffin wrote:
>>
>> I'll do that today.   I've looked in older logs, and I find places
>> where the kernel puts out the "unable to load firmware" message, but
>> then gets link beat anyway.
>>
> Well, I've never been a believer in coincidence, but I've booted the old
> kernel (2.37.4) as well as 2009.1 and Knoppix, and it appears that the
> onboard r8169 NIC just happened to pick the reboot to 2.38 to break.
> Nobody sees a link beat on it.  A NIC which just happens to give up the
> ghost coincidentally with a reboot would have been pretty far down my
> list of possibilities.
>
> Sorry for the noise.

I'm not sure it's broken.

Realtek is known to have somewhat crappy NICs that can tend to lock up 
in a "middle state" if a driver probe comes too fast, and then they dont 
react to any link or driver loading anymore.

One way that might help is to power off the computer, disconnect it from 
power _and_ disconnect the network cables, wait a few minutes, connect 
everything again and try again.

On one system I had to install Windows and disable/enable the nic and it 
got back to normal :(

I also have had a system with 2 r8169 nics that when setup in 
teaming/bonding, nic2 will grab the mac address from nic1, and screw up 
udev nic assignments making the system boot up without lan :(

--
Thomas