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I'm guessing the story is overall similar to how gigabit ethernet was ~ten years ago: Use Intel if you want working hardware and drivers that actually achieve l

I'm guessing the story is overall similar to how gigabit ethernet was ~ten years ago: Use Intel if you want working hardware and drivers that actually achieve line-rate throughput. Back then the RTL chips were a trashfire and couldn't do gigabit even on Windows. Nowadays the RTL chips can do that. And here we are again with bad / proprietary network drivers for RTL chips.

nightfly 5y ago
Isn't it the same for wifi? On nearly every laptop I've owned I've ended up swapping for an Intel wireless card eventually.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Yes, and even the generational changes can be quite worth it - I recently swapped a 2016 Intel 8265 wifi card with a newer AX210 (- which costs basically nothing) and even without utilizing the updated standards I got 50-80 % more bandwidth under exactly the same conditions.
gsich 5y ago
The driver from Realtek is GPL2. Maybe the code quality is not good enough for the kernel. https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/network-interface-controllers-10-100-1000m-gigabit-ethernet-pci-express-software https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/network-in...
- my123 5y ago
  They are upstream nowadays. Supported mainline by the r8169 driver.
  - gsich 5y ago
    Yeah, but according to the blog post there must be some difference. "Supported" but not "fully supported". Mainline has 8k lines, Realteks driver has 15k lines in only 1 .c file and there are some more.
my123 5y ago
For 2.5GbE, this became very much not the case. > Use Intel if you want working hardware Sadly Intel totally dropped the ball on this. i225-V (Foxville) NIC early steppings were awful. And no driver can fix that, it required Intel to produce a new stepping... countless motherboards are affected by that one... Realtek NICs are fine at this point in time.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  Intel’s 2.5G is just an afterthought. Realtek pushes it because it’s more cost-effective than 10G but that’s where the actual party is at and where you’ll find good hardware and software support to match.. but at a price.
- makomk 5y ago
  Yeah, Intel managed to incorrectly implement the 2.5GbE standard with the result that if you connected older steppings of their NIC to a standards-compliant device massive packet loss and effective data transfer speeds apparently as low as kilobytes/sec in some cases ensued. The only workaround was to force it to gigabit mode. They took an age to release a stepping that fixed this and I think there may have been other issues too, so a whole bunch of motherboards ended up shipping with 2.5Gb support that was effectively unusable.
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    To be honest, multiple vendors have really screwed up 2.5/5/10G implementations—I tried cheaping out with FlyProFiber copper transceivers, and would get a solid 2.3 Gbps one way, with 400-800 Mbps the other way. Turns out there was tons of packet loss, but only in one direction. They worked fine for 10 Gbps, but I had to switch to Mikrotik transceivers for 2.5G connections.
- bcrl 5y ago
  Not all Realtek NICs are fine at this point in time. For some models of Realtek NIcs the Linux driver has to memcpy() data for every single packet in order to work around a hardware bug. It's entirely possible that the Linux driver has that kind of workaround enabled for newer hardware that doesn't need it anymore, but getting that kind of driver change merged tends to be a bit of an uphill battle without having the hardware manufacturer actively involved in maintenance of the mainline open source driver.
userbinator 5y ago
Realtek was always the "budget" choice.

nightfly 5y ago

Isn't it the same for wifi? On nearly every laptop I've owned I've ended up swapping for an Intel wireless card eventually.

formerly_proven 5y ago
Yes, and even the generational changes can be quite worth it - I recently swapped a 2016 Intel 8265 wifi card with a newer AX210 (- which costs basically nothing) and even without utilizing the updated standards I got 50-80 % more bandwidth under exactly the same conditions.

gsich 5y ago

The driver from Realtek is GPL2. Maybe the code quality is not good enough for the kernel. https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/network-interface-controllers-10-100-1000m-gigabit-ethernet-pci-express-software https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/network-in...

my123 5y ago
They are upstream nowadays. Supported mainline by the r8169 driver.
- gsich 5y ago
  Yeah, but according to the blog post there must be some difference. "Supported" but not "fully supported". Mainline has 8k lines, Realteks driver has 15k lines in only 1 .c file and there are some more.

my123 5y ago

For 2.5GbE, this became very much not the case. > Use Intel if you want working hardware Sadly Intel totally dropped the ball on this. i225-V (Foxville) NIC early steppings were awful. And no driver can fix that, it required Intel to produce a new stepping... countless motherboards are affected by that one... Realtek NICs are fine at this point in time.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
Intel’s 2.5G is just an afterthought. Realtek pushes it because it’s more cost-effective than 10G but that’s where the actual party is at and where you’ll find good hardware and software support to match.. but at a price.
makomk 5y ago
Yeah, Intel managed to incorrectly implement the 2.5GbE standard with the result that if you connected older steppings of their NIC to a standards-compliant device massive packet loss and effective data transfer speeds apparently as low as kilobytes/sec in some cases ensued. The only workaround was to force it to gigabit mode. They took an age to release a stepping that fixed this and I think there may have been other issues too, so a whole bunch of motherboards ended up shipping with 2.5Gb support that was effectively unusable.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  To be honest, multiple vendors have really screwed up 2.5/5/10G implementations—I tried cheaping out with FlyProFiber copper transceivers, and would get a solid 2.3 Gbps one way, with 400-800 Mbps the other way. Turns out there was tons of packet loss, but only in one direction. They worked fine for 10 Gbps, but I had to switch to Mikrotik transceivers for 2.5G connections.
bcrl 5y ago
Not all Realtek NICs are fine at this point in time. For some models of Realtek NIcs the Linux driver has to memcpy() data for every single packet in order to work around a hardware bug. It's entirely possible that the Linux driver has that kind of workaround enabled for newer hardware that doesn't need it anymore, but getting that kind of driver change merged tends to be a bit of an uphill battle without having the hardware manufacturer actively involved in maintenance of the mainline open source driver.

userbinator 5y ago

Realtek was always the "budget" choice.