Gigabyte Ethernet RTL8168 broken on new Kernel releases
by selfprogrammed from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6KB2E)
Can the Slackware release of the kernel include a patch so those of us with Gigabyte motherboards can have working Ethernet.
The patch is just to add a PHY recognition code to the RealTek driver. This has been discussed on the kernel bug reporting, and is a known problem. It is not getting fixed because the maintainer is blocking it because of the "purity" of his software. He claims the BIOS is buggy and users must replace their hardware or try upgrading the BIOS, rather than have him include the recognition of that PHY the way it is on existing hardware.
I just got burned by this, AGAIN, when I tried to use the Ethernet after having upgraded to a newer kernel using the Slackware patches.
The Ethernet interface just does not come up. This is going to happen every time I upgrade the Slackware kernel.
It cost me 8 hours of trying to figure out why the Ethernet was not working.
This problem does not report anything that can easily be found. There is one message in dmesg, that can be found, once you realize the problem is a broken kernel driver.
It worked in previous kernels, so the problem became how could it suddenly be broken. Too many wrong rabbit holes that had to be investigated.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-a-4175710077/
---
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204343
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213469
There is a patch for kernel 5.10 there:
The patch simply adds the PHY ID reported by the Gigabyte BIOS to the list of known PHY.
It matches what I see on my hardware.
The driver has been modified since, so the patch will not apply directly.
No, they were not fixing this problem. I still see it on 5.15.19 (slackware).
petr.bahula 2021-06-17 10:13:49 UTC
Hi,
we have two GIGABITE MB with this onboard chip.
The chip is detected differ on each MB:
[ 1.702543] r8169 0000:03:00.0: no dedicated PHY driver found for PHY ID 0xc2077002, maybe realtek.ko needs to be added to initramfs?
[ 1.702544] r8169 0000:03:00.0: no dedicated PHY driver found for PHY ID 0xc1071002, maybe realtek.ko needs to be added to initramfs?
In my case following (not fully correct, but working) patch for kernel 5.10.27 helped:
Code:--- a/drivers/net/phy/realtek.c 2020-12-13 23:41:30.000000000 +0100
+++ b/drivers/net/phy/realtek.c 2021-06-17 11:51:00.854994117 +0200
@@ -674,6 +674,14 @@
.config_intr = genphy_no_config_intr,
.suspend = genphy_suspend,
.resume = genphy_resume,
+ }, {
+ .phy_id = 0xc0070002,
+ .phy_id_mask = 0xf0ff0fff,
+ .name = "Generic RTL PHY",
+ .get_features = genphy_read_abilities,
+ .suspend = genphy_suspend,
+ .resume = genphy_resume,
+ .set_loopback = genphy_loopback,
},
};
The patch is just to add a PHY recognition code to the RealTek driver. This has been discussed on the kernel bug reporting, and is a known problem. It is not getting fixed because the maintainer is blocking it because of the "purity" of his software. He claims the BIOS is buggy and users must replace their hardware or try upgrading the BIOS, rather than have him include the recognition of that PHY the way it is on existing hardware.
I just got burned by this, AGAIN, when I tried to use the Ethernet after having upgraded to a newer kernel using the Slackware patches.
The Ethernet interface just does not come up. This is going to happen every time I upgrade the Slackware kernel.
It cost me 8 hours of trying to figure out why the Ethernet was not working.
This problem does not report anything that can easily be found. There is one message in dmesg, that can be found, once you realize the problem is a broken kernel driver.
It worked in previous kernels, so the problem became how could it suddenly be broken. Too many wrong rabbit holes that had to be investigated.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-a-4175710077/
---
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204343
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213469
There is a patch for kernel 5.10 there:
The patch simply adds the PHY ID reported by the Gigabyte BIOS to the list of known PHY.
It matches what I see on my hardware.
The driver has been modified since, so the patch will not apply directly.
No, they were not fixing this problem. I still see it on 5.15.19 (slackware).
petr.bahula 2021-06-17 10:13:49 UTC
Hi,
we have two GIGABITE MB with this onboard chip.
The chip is detected differ on each MB:
[ 1.702543] r8169 0000:03:00.0: no dedicated PHY driver found for PHY ID 0xc2077002, maybe realtek.ko needs to be added to initramfs?
[ 1.702544] r8169 0000:03:00.0: no dedicated PHY driver found for PHY ID 0xc1071002, maybe realtek.ko needs to be added to initramfs?
In my case following (not fully correct, but working) patch for kernel 5.10.27 helped:
Code:--- a/drivers/net/phy/realtek.c 2020-12-13 23:41:30.000000000 +0100
+++ b/drivers/net/phy/realtek.c 2021-06-17 11:51:00.854994117 +0200
@@ -674,6 +674,14 @@
.config_intr = genphy_no_config_intr,
.suspend = genphy_suspend,
.resume = genphy_resume,
+ }, {
+ .phy_id = 0xc0070002,
+ .phy_id_mask = 0xf0ff0fff,
+ .name = "Generic RTL PHY",
+ .get_features = genphy_read_abilities,
+ .suspend = genphy_suspend,
+ .resume = genphy_resume,
+ .set_loopback = genphy_loopback,
},
};