On Sun, 2013-10-13 at 13:00 -0600, Shawn Heisey wrote: > On 10/13/2013 11:42 AM, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > - There is no firmware patch for your LAN-on-motherboard chip > > (RTL8168B). > > > > - There is a firmware patch for the chip on the PCIe card (RTL8168D), > > but this was never included in the driver in Debian kernels (except in > > some experimental versions). > > > > The firmware files are patches to the PHY firmware on newer chips that > > generally improve link stability. The driver can and does work without > > them (since 2.6.32-3) but the chip will be less likely to maintain a > > stable gigabit link if the requested patch is not available. Which is > > why I asked... > > I think the bug can now be closed. A different cable has fixed it. At > first I thought it was a combination of a different cable and purging > the firmware, plus rebuilding the initramfs, but now I have re-added the > firmware and it still works. > > I didn't think the cable was the issue because I had *tried* swapping > the cable out back when the issue first appeared in 2010. I was very > methodical about the troubleshooting and saw zero difference with four > different cables. It sounds like there may have been two different problems limiting you to a 100M link. 1. Driver and cable are good for 1G. 2. Driver bug introduced (post-2.6.30) so will only work at 100M with any of the cables you try. 3. Cable degrades so will only work at 100M. 4. Driver bug fixed (when?) so can work at 1G, but is now limited by cable. 5. You replace the cable and have a 1G link again. > I hate wasting people's time, so I'm very careful with troubleshooting. > I am so very sorry! Don't worry about it. > There is one related but different issue that I noticed. Because I > don't use wake-on-lan, it doesn't affect me right now. When the OS > shuts down and powers the machine off, link is gone. Power must be > completely removed from the power supply to re-establish link while the > computer is off and allow wake-on-lan to work. Is this a bug, or > expected behavior? Is there something that someone could add to > /etc/network/interfaces to re-enable link after deconfiguring the interface? Wake-on-LAN (WoL) must be enabled in Linux, not just in the BIOS. I.e. you should put an ethernet-wol line in /etc/network/interfaces per /usr/share/doc/ethtool/README.Debian. The driver (or firmware) should take care of bringing up the link at suspend or power-off, if WoL is enabled. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald Knuth
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part