SDB:Realtek 8169 driver problem

Tested on: 11.4

Situation

You are running a Realtek 8168, 8169, 8101 or 8111 chipset based card but the network doesn't work, but the driver reports that the interface is up and running. DHCP never return an IP. In yast2 the interface is said "disconnected". You are running dual boot Windows and Linux on your machine.

Reason

The Realtek Windows driver disables the NIC at Windows shutdown time. The current linux r8169 driver does not know how to turn on the NIC from this disabled state, therefor the device will not respond, even if the driver loads and reports that the device is up.

Workaround

Here are four workarounds for this issue:

1. You power down the machine completely and unplug the power supply for a few seconds (about 10 will do). This seems to reset the card and the Linux driver work until you boot Windows again.

2. You enable "Wake-on-lan after shutdown." in the Windows device manager. This prevents the Windows driver to disable the card. With newer Windows driver versions this option is not available anymore, instead there is an option "Shutdown Wake On Lan". Changing that new option from "Enabled" to "Disabled" cannot be confirmed to fix the issue.

3. Download and compile the Linux drivers provided by Realtek instead of using the r8169 driver shipped with the openSUSE Linux kernel. Alternatively these drivers are also provided by the drivers:nic Open Build Service repository.

4. Try different options for the reboot kernel option. The following options are valid: warm, cold, gpio, bios, acpi, kbd, triple, efi, pci, force

The syntax is reboot=OPTION (e.g: reboot=efi or reboot=pci). Kernel options can be modified from YaST -> Boot Loader -> Kernel Parameters

References

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_RTL8168

<keyword>realtek,8168,8169,8101,8111</keyword>