RealTek Ethernet: RTL8169S/SB/SC RTL8168B RTL8101E RTL8110

All CentOS versions released after June 2008 include proper drivers for these chipsets so all the below information is obsolete. If run a recent CentOS version and you encounter issues with a Realtek wired network card, please consider installing the driver provided by Realtek and distributed as kmod by the ElRepo 3rd party repository. See https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories for details.

Important obs:

Realtek has obsoleted the driver, offering instead the following drivers:

For the RTL8111/8168B chipset the r8168 driver should be used.
For the RTL8100E/RTL8101E/RTL8102E-GR chipset there is the r8101 driver.
The preferred driver for the RTL8110S/8169S chipset is r8169 which is included in the kernel provided by the distribution. However, as of March 2008, it seems that not all the functionality of the driver provided by the chip manufacturer has been merged.

The last version of the r1000 driver known to compile under Centos 4 and Centos 5 is 1.05. Later versions are neither supported nor functional. If you are on a Centos 4 or Centos 5 system and you plan to use the dkms enabled version from RPMForge, make sure you download and use version 1.05. However even version 1.05 of this driver might not work correctly, especially in Centos 4 and 5. Use it only if neither the stock r8169 driver nor the r8168 or r8101 drivers work for you.

1. Hardware

As of version 1.05, according to the source of the driver the following chipsets are supported:

RTL8100E
RTL8101E (Fast Ethernet with PCI-Express interface).
RTL8110S/SB/SC
RTL8111B
RTL8169/S/SB (Gigabit Ethernet with PCI interface).
RTL8168B (Gigabit Ethernet with PCI-Express interface).

Version 1.06 adds support for RTL8169SC and RTL8168C. Motherboards known to work with this driver:

Asus P5B
MSI K9AGM2-L

2. Problem

Drivers not included in the kernel as of 2.6.20.4.

3. Output of `lspci -v`

01:08.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169SC Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
        Subsystem: ABIT Computer Corp. Unknown device 1c2b
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 201
        I/O ports at cc00 [size=256]
        Memory at fafff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at fd900000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 01)
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device 8168
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 177
        I/O ports at c800 [size=256]
        Memory at fc9ff000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Expansion ROM at fc9c0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [48] Vital Product Data
        Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/1 Enable-
        Capabilities: [60] Express Endpoint IRQ 0
        Capabilities: [84] Vendor Specific Information

4. Solution

1) Driver disk r1000-2.6.18_8.img

r1000-kmod-1.05-3.2.6.18_8.1.1.el5.src.rpm

2) As an alternative method, a dkms-enabled driver package can be downloaded from RPMForge. Please follow the instructions available at http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories/RPMForge to install and activate this repository. After that you can use

yum install dkms-r1000

to install the driver (and all its dependencies) on your system.

Obs: you will need a functional network connection in order to download this package. A couple more packages will also be installed (the full list is here). The dkms-autoinstaller service which will be installed and automatically enabled will recompile the driver module each time you boot with a kernel which does not provide the required driver.

5. Notes

Version r1000-kmod-1.05-3.2.6.18_8.1.1.el5 has the following mods:

1. The userland (docs) package provides r1000-kmod-common (per the Fedora kmod instruction page)

2. The kernel version is included in the package name, since a kmod RPM will be required for each kernel version (since it installs in /lib/modules/uname -r/extras)

3. Upgraded the kmodtool (SOURCE10 in the SPEC) to the latest version (0.10.13).