After recently updating the windows drivers (I dual-boot Windows XP on the machine the NIC is in), I hit this problem: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_RTL8168#Troubleshooting which affects re(4) like it does the Linux drivers described in the above link.
I already wrote the Realtek technical support about it since their "own" FreeBSD driver (a hacked rl(4) that does not support any of the chip's advanced features) does not manage to power up the PHY on its own either - neither does the motherboard's BIOS when trying to netboot. The other problem is that I have at least two applications misbehaving when rxcsum/txcsum is enabled: - The Linux Second Life client (yes, yes, I know, but it is nice for showing off GLX and it is really really good at generating network traffic) will cease to receive data after about a minute or so - turning off rcxsum/txcsum will mend it on the spot. - A Fedora Core 4 running in Qemu, networked with bridge(4) and tap(4), cannot receive an ip address via DHCP. Interestingly, this even occurs if rxcsum/txcsum was already turned off before launching Qemu - to make it work, I have to cycle rxcsum/txcsum once. Might be related to promiscuous mode. I realise that both of these make awful test cases, but so far they are the only applications I found to expose those problems. This is on FreeBSD kiste 6.2-STABLE FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE #4: Sat Jul 28 14:11:23 CEST 2007 root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/KISTE-SMP i386. The kernel sources are up to date as of 2007-07-27. The NIC is re0: <RealTek 8168/8111B PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xd800-0xd8ff mem 0xfbfff000-0xfbffffff irq 36 at device 0.0 on pci3 / [EMAIL PROTECTED]:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x81681849 chip=0x816810ec rev=0x01 hdr=0x00. -- ,_, | Michael Nottebrock | [EMAIL PROTECTED] (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve | http://www.freebsd.org \u/ | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
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