SDB:Realtek 8139 Driver Problem

From openSUSE

Version: 10.1

Situation

You are running a Realtek 8139 related card but the network doesn't work

Background

Sometimes it occurs that the card is detected as 8139 but there are different version of the 8139 available.

Where The 8139cp driver is for RealTek RTL-8139C+ series 10/100 PCI Ethernet driver

and the 8139too driver is for RealTek RTL-8139 Fast Ethernet driver

As you can see the 8139too driver is a common one.

Solution

First get the information about the network card

hwinfo --netcard

Have a look at the end of the output

 Driver Info #0:
   Driver Status: 8139cp is active
   Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe 8139cp"
 Config Status: cfg=no, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
 Attached to: #14 (PCI bridge)
 Driver Info #1:
    Driver Status: 8139too is not active
    Driver Activation CMD:  "modprobe 8139too"

The situtation could be also vice-versa When we know what kind of module is active we first deactivated it

rmmod 8139cp

and than we start the other module

modprobe 8139too

Now we restart the network

rcnetwork restart 

Normally now you can access your network settings have a look at

ifconfig

where you should find ethx now. The x stand for card enumeration, like eth0 for first.

If you are dual booting with a Windows operating system, it's possible that you might be affected by the below issue with regards to the kernel driver. You can try to enable "Wake-on-lan after shutdown." from within the Windows device manager to see if the problem goes away.

Full post below.

As of 27 May 2007, in kernel 2.6.21.3, you may experience the issues with the r8169 driver if you dual boot Windows on some systems. Windows by defaults disables the NIC at Windows shutdown time in order to disable Wake-On-Lan, and this NIC will remain disabled until the next time Windows turns it on. The r8169 driver in the kernel does not know how to turn the NIC on from this disabled state; therefore, the device will not respond, even if the driver loads and reports that the device is up. To work around this problem, simply enable the feature "Wake-on-lan after shutdown." You can set this option through Windows' device manager.