Stuck with an rtls? (Realtek 8139)

I've recently hacked up the Realtek driver (rtls) to support GLDv3. Its part of usr/closed right now (though I hope we can open source it!), so I can only share binaries.

Anyway, if you're stuck with this driver on your x86 system (because its on your motherboard, usually), and you want to try running a GLDv3 version of the driver, let me know.

The GLDv3 brings link aggregation support, VLAN support, and virtualization (IP instances) with it.

Of course the hardware is still somewhat crummy, so I wouldn't expect to get much performance out of it. But again, if you're stuck with it (as many people probably are) this may be helpful.

Comments

Unknown said…
Do you think the rtls driver will be enhanced to support the RTL8029 adapter? This appears to be the adapter presented by Parallels to Solaris guests, and it would be cool to be able to use networking w/o having to install the driver from the included ISO. Also, it would be awesome to be able to experiment with GLDv3 features from inside a Parallels VM.

Thanks for the awesome work on converting drivers!!
- Ryan
August 19, 2007 at 8:49 AM
Unknown said…
Its unlikely, because the 8029 is a totally different NIC and shares little in common with the 8139. Perhaps I'll take a look at it later, though.
August 19, 2007 at 9:08 PM
Unknown said…
Realtek rtls driver doesn't work in my configuration -- I can ping the host's own address and it reports being alive, but the network is unreachable. Do you think it can be related to the changes you made?
September 26, 2007 at 11:13 AM
Unknown said…
pdembinski: can you please e-mail offline. (garrett dot damore at sun dot com)? It is possible that you are impacted by changes, but I want to go over your configuration first.

I have heard that these changes broke the new xVM emulated rtl8139 device in b73/b74. With my real physical device, I've not had any problems, but there could be edge cases out there that I'm not handling right.
September 26, 2007 at 12:00 PM
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