[Mageia-dev] Sudden problems with r8169 NICs ?

Thu Mar 24 21:37:21 CET 2011

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
+