OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Networking

OS/2, Realtek and NIC drivers

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Ben:
I recently upgraded some of my hardware and my new motherboard has a built-in Realtek PCIe Gigabit NIC.

The RTGNDA13, (version 2.01),  drivers work fine for TCP/IP, however MPTN will not work with it.

I searched online, but could not find a thing.

I heard about some new NIC drivers being developed by Mensys, but I could not find a list.

Has anyone here had any success getting this NIC to work with eCS?


Update:

I could not find a better name for the NIC than that, neither in the manual, nor listed in Windows 7 Device Manager, but the board shows a chip labeled "RTL 8111E".

ivan:
Which Realtek chip does it use?

Ben:
Like I said in the above post RTL 8111E. 8) I guess you posted your reply before I updated the post. No matter.

I have since found the driver I heard rumours of, it is the Mensys MultiMac and it lists my NIC. 8)

And strangely enough, I found it on the eComstation BetaZone! a site I had long given up for dead. 8)

Anyway, it works even worse than the Realtek 8169 driver which at least gave me TCP/IP.

Oh, well, unless someone is aware of another driver then I'm dead in the water with respect to that chipset. 8(

Doug Bissett:
You need to go to the eComStation Software Subscription site. If you do not have that, you do not have access to anything that has been released after your subscription ran out. It must be renewed after one year (the site becomes static, as you describe, if you don't).

The ONLY version of the Multimac Realtek driver that will work with the chipset that you have, is the one from that source. It was, unfortunately released as r8169-0.3.1.wpi, which is the same name, and version, used for an earlier, defective, version of the driver. The one that works, for me, is dated 5/17/2013 (m/d/y). Bldlevel reports:

--- Code: ---Signature:       @#D Azarewicz:0.3.1#@##1## 17 May 2013 08:46:29     DAZAR1
:::1::SVN253@@Realtek 8169/1Gb PCIe MAC Driver
Vendor:          D Azarewicz
Revision:        0.03.1
Date/Time:       17 May 2013 08:46:29
Build Machine:   DAZAR1
FixPak Version:  SVN253
File Version:    0.3.1
Description:     Realtek 8169/1Gb PCIe MAC Driver

--- End code ---
on the r8169.os2 file. If that is what you have, please report that it doesn't work, with as much information as you can supply, at the Multimac bug tracker.

I have three Realtek Gigabit devices. PCI.EXE describes one, on board device, as:
Device 8168h RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
it is, in fact a:
10EC:8168 version 21 (RTL8168c/8111c)
(from RtlChipId.exe, that is available in the Software Subscription betazone).
A second, on board device, is described as:
Device 8168h RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
It is, in fact:
10EC:8168 version 33 (RTL8168evl/8111evl)
which is probably the same as yours.
I don't have the other one installed, but I think it is
10EC:8169 version ?? (RTL8169a/8111a)
(or something similar). It is on a PCI plug in card.

As you can see, Ivan's question is valid, you need to find out which Realtek chip it is, and the only tool, that I know about, that actually tells you that, is RtlChipId.exe, which is found in the betazone under Software Subscription (which is NOT the same as the betazone in the eCS web site).

The third one always worked with the various versions of the Multimac Realtek driver.

The first one started working, before the second one did.

The second one is working properly, with the above mentioned driver, but did some nasty things before the latest driver was available. One of those nasty things is that it disabled the ethernet interface, and the ONLY way to get it turned back on, is to turn off all power to the machine (pull the plug, - and remove the battery if it is a laptop - for a minute, or so). Even windows (and the working Multimac driver) wouldn't re-enable it, before the power was removed. The only other driver, that came close to working, was the old RTGNDA driver.

Alex Taylor:
There are basically 3 RealTek GbE drivers available (well, 3 1/2).

* The RTGNDA driver (which you have)
* GenMAC with a RealTek driver package
* The MultiMac driver. There are actually two different drivers: the older (and unreliable) R8110 driver, and the newer R8169 driver which was written to replace it.The RTGNDA driver works reasonably well in some circumstances, but not in others, and IIRC has some critical flaw like not being SMP-safe (or something like that).

The GenMAC driver supposedly works OK if it supports your chipset, but may require a manually-specified MAC address (see below).

The R8110 driver was apparently so badly written that the MultiMac developer decided to simply abandon it rather than try and fix it, and wrote the newer R8169 driver from scratch to replace it. However, if using R8169 you are very strongly recommended to have at least version 0.31, as earlier versions suffered from various other problems.

One other point. In all of the above cases (with maybe the exception of recent versions of R8169), on some chipsets you might not get a usable MAC address after booting. If this is the case (check your LANTRAN.LOG and/or the output of netstat -n, 'physical address' value - if it's all 0 then you have this problem), you need to manually specify the MAC address in your MPTS config. This parameter is driver specific but is usually called 'NETADDRESS'.  Note that not all versions of R8110.OS2 support this option, but you shouldn't be using R8110.OS2 anyway as it's buggy and obsolete.  I don't remember offhand if GenMAC supports it or not.

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