Re: looking for testers for if_rge - RTL8125/8126/8127 ethernet driver

Hi!

Happy to be of service! Anything else we can do to get more testers? 
(I'll see if I can make some noise on Mastodon).
Should there be some instruction on providing feedback in the port?

Let's make this a very short-lived port.

Cheers, Bernard.

On 2025-12-01 02:42, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> hi!
> 
> Thanks! My goal is to get this into a review next week, so hopefully
> this is a short lived port!
> 
> 
> -a
> 
> On Sun, 30 Nov 2025 at 10:48, Bernard Spil <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Turns out the realtek-re-kmod wasn't working out for me after all,
>> machine started repeatedly crashing.
>> 
>> Committed the port net/realtek-rge-kmod hoping to attract more 
>> testers.
>> So far, works out great for me. GMKTek M5 Plus / AMD 5825U / Dual 
>> RTL8215
>> FreeBSD 15.0-RC4-p1 releng/15.0-n280991-c7ccd5b3f879 GENERIC amd64
>> 
>> Testing with 2 clients, both 100 parallel streams iperf3 bidirectional
>> for 10 minutes showed negligible load.
>> 
>> rge0@pci0:1:0:0:        class=0x020000 rev=0x05 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10ec
>> device=0x8125 subvendor=0x10ec subdevice=0x8125
>>     vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
>>     device     = 'RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller'
>>     class      = network
>>     subclass   = ethernet
>> rge1@pci0:2:0:0:        class=0x020000 rev=0x05 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10ec
>> device=0x8125 subvendor=0x10ec subdevice=0x8125
>>     vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
>>     device     = 'RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller'
>>     class      = network
>>     subclass   = ethernet
>> 
>> Cheers, Bernard.
>> 
>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 2:51 PM Bernard Spil <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > Thanks to flo for notifying me that there's an alternative to
>> > net/realtek-re-kmod.
>> >
>> > I've had crashes running realtek-re-kmod and realtek-re-kmod198
>> > before, none of the switches seemed to help.
>> > After upgrading to from 14.3 to 15.0-RC4-p1, I thought I'd test again.
>> > So far so good, no crashes. Generating load with iperf for 5 minutes
>> > from 2 machines to the server works OK with the 1101.00 for now.
>> >
>> > Nice to have this if_rge in the back pocket when things don't work out
>> > with 1101.00. Started porting it, find the patch at
>> > https://brnrd.eu/bsd/patch-net_realtek-rge-kmod-20251129
>> > Seeing that this is supposed to land in base, I'm holding back on committing it.
>> >
>> > Thanks all! Bernard (brnrd@)
>> >
>> > On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 5:48 PM Adrian Chadd <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > On Thu, 27 Nov 2025 at 10:13, Florian Smeets <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > > >
>> > > > On 23.11.25 03:16, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> > > > > hi!
>> > > > >
>> > > > > i've ported Kevin Lo's openbsd driver for these realtek chipsets to FreeBSD.
>> > > > > It works well enough for me to use on my laptop w/ RTL8125B / Killer E3000.
>> > > > > I'm now opening it up to others who are willing to build/run a kernel
>> > > > > module to test the driver out and report back.
>> > > > >
>> > > > This is great. Finally, an in tree driver for these very common NICs.
>> > > > The 1100.00 version of the net/realtek-re-kmod was just unreliable for
>> > > > me (constant hangs, no matter which options I turned off and on). I've
>> > > > only done light testing with the official 1101.00 driver. I was able to
>> > > > wedge it with less than a minute of iperf3, and the ifconfig down/up
>> > > > dance that was able to revive the interface with 1100.00 was not able to
>> > > > recover the interface.
>> > > >
>> > > > I ran if_rge on my NAS and did some testing. I haven't had one hang with
>> > > > this driver, even after pounding the network for hours. That's a big
>> > > > plus for me. Thanks.
>> > > >
>> > > > I was able to achieve close to 2.5Gb/s TX and close to 1Gb/s RX with
>> > > > iperf3 --bidir.
>> > > >
>> > > > CPU usage appears to be substantially higher than with the official
>> > > > Realtek driver.
>> > >
>> > > That's a good data point.
>> > >
>> > > >
>> > > > [intr{irq59: rge0}] goes to around 50% of one core, and [kernel{rge0
>> > > > taskq thread}] hovers between 20-25% when running the above iperf3 tests.
>> > > >
>> > > > With the official 1101.00 driver, the only process using > 1% CPU is
>> > > > this one [kernel{re0 taskq}] and it is around 10% with the test
>> > > > mentioned above.
>> > >
>> > > I'll go dig into that a bit. It shouldn't be taking very much CPU to process
>> > > this number of packets; the bulk of the CPU should be used by the IP stack.
>> > >
>> > > I'll go run some profiling over the next few days and see if I can nail down
>> > > what I'm doing poorly. Hopefully it's something stupid on my end. ;-)
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > -adrian
>> > >