Re: r8169 hangs machine on kernel boot (bisected)

[Alexander Wuerstlein <arw@arw.name>]

Hello,

On 11-02-18 15:01, hayeswang <hayeswang@realtek.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> > I've just tried to boot a new computer featuring a Realtek r8168 onboard (lspci
> > calls it Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit
> > Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 04), see [1]) network chip with kernel
> > 2.6.38-rc5 and current git. Both hang on boot just after USB device
> > initialization and just before the kernel usually does DHCP. The previous 2.6.37
> > didn't hang on boot, but showed strange behaviour (only 10MBit half duplex on
> > autonegotiation, tons of errors on the switch interface[2]) which is why I tried
> > the newer kernel in hopes that there would be fixes.
> > 
> > I bisected the hang-before-dhcp bug down to commit 'r8169: magic.'
> > (b646d90053f887c1bc243191e693a9b02d09f2c2, also see [1]). Since the commit
> > really does its description justice and looks like some weird hardware magic,
> > I'd like to ask the wizards on how to proceed with fixing it.
> 
> I have try the 8168DP and it wouldn't hang. I think I need more information.
> Could you give the information about the motherboard and the version of BIOS.
> Besides, please use the realtek driver, and dump the MAC information by using
> "ethtool -d eth0". These are helpful to find out what happens. Thanks.

I'm sorry that it took me so long to answer, I've had some problems
booting the machine today since the PXE-Client didn't get any DHCP
requests through. I'm not sure if its related, the problem cleared up
after I opened up the machine to get the motherboard data and stuff.

Long story short, new files 'bios', 'hardware' and 'ethtool-d' in
http://wwwcip.cs.fau.de/~snalwuer/kernel-r8169
Bios revision is the latest available from Fujitsu for that hardware.
Hardware numbers and serials are accurate, but the inscriptions on the
chips I suspected to be PHYs were very hard to read, so expect errors.
The 'ethtool-d' is especially curious, since it consists of only
'FF'-bytes. The ethtool register dump was taken on a 2.6.37 with r8168
as a module.

fujitsu.com also has some (limited, end-user-focused) hardware
documentation if you enter the serial number 'YL7E003277' on
http://ts.fujitsu.com/support/downloads.html

If you need any further information, don't hesitate to ask.



Ciao,

Alexander Wuerstlein.