3 ms·

I got tired of fighting that NIC, and got a Realtek 2.5g one. All my problems gone, life is good.

by snvzz 4y ago

LinuxBender 4y ago
I would totally do that but I have a few mini-PC's that have the I225-V and I can't swap them out. I've used USB3.2->Ethernet dongles as work arounds until I could find a switch that was happy with it. Same with the latest Protectli firewalls, they also have the I225-V. For those I have to use ethtool to force a specific speed which is not ideal. I'm thinking mini-PC's are maybe a mistake in this generation of NICs.
- levifig 4y ago
  Same boat here. Care to share what switch you ended up landing on? I'm still searching… :'(
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    They all have issues but the worst issues I ran into were on the TrendNet switches. The NIC's would start to get into carrier reset loops or sometimes would reset with no predictable pattern. I225-V + Trendnet seem to amplify each others bugs. Those switches also have problems with the I219-V. I threw those switches away. The TP-Link and Netgear switches had the least issues for me in that I only had to force a particular speed to avoid sometimes negotiating at 100mb. I am not sure people will notice the negotiating bugs unless their family are heavy bandwidth users. I noticed it because of streaming and gaming at the same time plus I shut down my machines at night so I have a coin-flip chance of negotiating incorrectly every day.
- justinclift 4y ago
  Which mini PC's have the issue?
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    I do not have an all-inclusive list of which mini-PC's have the I225-V's. I have a few versions of the AMD Ryzen's and they all have them. The latest Protectli firewalls also mini-PC's have them. Several of the off-brand mini-PC's on Amazon have them. Some of the Intel NUCs may have them. If buying one of these online I suggest first posting a customer question about what NICs they have.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      > AMD Ryzen Damn. That's pretty much a requirement for any upcoming home lab gear here, so I'd better be careful about this aspect when researching. Thanks. :)
userbinator 4y ago
I've had good experience with Realtek NICs too, not 2.5g yet but their 10/100/1000 models. I suspect that's because they use a far simpler design with not much in the way of fancy features[1]. They also tend to benchmark slower with higher CPU usage, but I'll take slightly slower but stable over fast but intermittent connectivity. [1] Ironically, in this case the Intel has to have a fancy feature, intended for increasing performance, disabled in order to increase performance.
- toast0 4y ago
  I've heard good things about Realtek's 2.5G nics, and bad things about Intel's; I've seen speculation that underlying cause is cross compatability between the two 2.5g specs that were merged into the standard and that most 2.5g switches use chips from companies that were behind the spec Intel was not behind. For 1G realteks, I've had ok luck with them, but I do see some issues. I recall having some problem with them while running the Linux tree drivers, but I've since switched to all FreeBSD. With my current realtek NICs and FreeBSD 13.1, I have the choice of the kernel driver where sometimes the NIC will stop processing packets, and the NIC acknowledges reset, but doesn't actually immediately reset and sometimes processes old packets after resetting, resulting in wild writes and bad behavior. There's a vendor driver, which doesn't seem to get into that bad state, but it does enable ethernet PAUSE frames which are an abomination. The vendor driver is full of undocumented magic values and there's no public documentation on the NICs at all, so figuring out what to frob to make the NIC not get stuck, but not send out PAUSE frames would be an exercise in frustration, that I'm not willing to do. Either way, the interrupt design is deficient: there's a shared interrupt for rx, tx and administration, and the status register doesn't really work right either --- it's possible for the host and device to disagree about what irqs were acknowleged and then things will get stuck (that doesn't seem to be the FreeBSD driver issue though; you can work around the stuck status communications by just assuming something probably happened aftet a few seconds, or checking for descriptor progess on rx and tx on any interrupt, etc). Having only a single interrupt means you can't meaningfully process incomming packets and finished outgoing descriptors in parallel which makes it hard to get full throughput in both directions simultaneously. Anyway --- if they work for you, great. I'm going to avoid them where practical, and be careful with them elsewhere.
jeffbee 4y ago
The Realtek NIC embedded in my Asus motherboard hits maybe 600mbps with a tailwind. It only has 1 receive queue and doesn't support interrupt coalescing. Junk.

I got tired of fighting that NIC, and got a Realtek 2.5g one. All my problems gone, life is good.

by snvzz 4y ago

I got tired of fighting that NIC, and got a Realtek 2.5g one. All my problems gone, life is good.

I would totally do that but I have a few mini-PC's that have the I225-V and I can't swap them out. I've used USB3.2->Ethernet dongles as work arounds until I could find a switch that was happy with it. Same with the latest Protectli firewalls, they also have the I225-V. For those I have to use ethtool to force a specific speed which is not ideal. I'm thinking mini-PC's are maybe a mistake in this generation of NICs.

levifig 4y ago
Same boat here. Care to share what switch you ended up landing on? I'm still searching… :'(
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  They all have issues but the worst issues I ran into were on the TrendNet switches. The NIC's would start to get into carrier reset loops or sometimes would reset with no predictable pattern. I225-V + Trendnet seem to amplify each others bugs. Those switches also have problems with the I219-V. I threw those switches away. The TP-Link and Netgear switches had the least issues for me in that I only had to force a particular speed to avoid sometimes negotiating at 100mb. I am not sure people will notice the negotiating bugs unless their family are heavy bandwidth users. I noticed it because of streaming and gaming at the same time plus I shut down my machines at night so I have a coin-flip chance of negotiating incorrectly every day.
justinclift 4y ago
Which mini PC's have the issue?
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  I do not have an all-inclusive list of which mini-PC's have the I225-V's. I have a few versions of the AMD Ryzen's and they all have them. The latest Protectli firewalls also mini-PC's have them. Several of the off-brand mini-PC's on Amazon have them. Some of the Intel NUCs may have them. If buying one of these online I suggest first posting a customer question about what NICs they have.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > AMD Ryzen Damn. That's pretty much a requirement for any upcoming home lab gear here, so I'd better be careful about this aspect when researching. Thanks. :)

userbinator 4y ago

I've had good experience with Realtek NICs too, not 2.5g yet but their 10/100/1000 models. I suspect that's because they use a far simpler design with not much in the way of fancy features[1]. They also tend to benchmark slower with higher CPU usage, but I'll take slightly slower but stable over fast but intermittent connectivity. [1] Ironically, in this case the Intel has to have a fancy feature, intended for increasing performance, disabled in order to increase performance.

toast0 4y ago
I've heard good things about Realtek's 2.5G nics, and bad things about Intel's; I've seen speculation that underlying cause is cross compatability between the two 2.5g specs that were merged into the standard and that most 2.5g switches use chips from companies that were behind the spec Intel was not behind. For 1G realteks, I've had ok luck with them, but I do see some issues. I recall having some problem with them while running the Linux tree drivers, but I've since switched to all FreeBSD. With my current realtek NICs and FreeBSD 13.1, I have the choice of the kernel driver where sometimes the NIC will stop processing packets, and the NIC acknowledges reset, but doesn't actually immediately reset and sometimes processes old packets after resetting, resulting in wild writes and bad behavior. There's a vendor driver, which doesn't seem to get into that bad state, but it does enable ethernet PAUSE frames which are an abomination. The vendor driver is full of undocumented magic values and there's no public documentation on the NICs at all, so figuring out what to frob to make the NIC not get stuck, but not send out PAUSE frames would be an exercise in frustration, that I'm not willing to do. Either way, the interrupt design is deficient: there's a shared interrupt for rx, tx and administration, and the status register doesn't really work right either --- it's possible for the host and device to disagree about what irqs were acknowleged and then things will get stuck (that doesn't seem to be the FreeBSD driver issue though; you can work around the stuck status communications by just assuming something probably happened aftet a few seconds, or checking for descriptor progess on rx and tx on any interrupt, etc). Having only a single interrupt means you can't meaningfully process incomming packets and finished outgoing descriptors in parallel which makes it hard to get full throughput in both directions simultaneously. Anyway --- if they work for you, great. I'm going to avoid them where practical, and be careful with them elsewhere.

jeffbee 4y ago

The Realtek NIC embedded in my Asus motherboard hits maybe 600mbps with a tailwind. It only has 1 receive queue and doesn't support interrupt coalescing. Junk.