Subject: R8101 driver link issue

From: Switact - Thomas Roes <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:03:16 +0100

L.S.

I'm using linux primaliry through Novell ZEN as part of it's imaging 
system. A "standard" problem is arrival of new network cards. Procedures 
to add new drivers to the boot image are well documented.

Recently I got problems with a new motherbord using the Realtek RTL8101E 
PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller.

This card is recognised by the r8169 driver but.... it always gives me 
"link down".

To troubleshoot this issue I installed SLED10SP1 on such a machine, 
which uses the same kernel as the ZEN imaging environment.

So i searched for drivers to compile and came across the 
r8101-1.006.tar.bz2 driver.

-1 To get this driver compiled, I have to edit the source at line 3273:
u32 mss = skb_shinfo(skb)->tso_size;
replace
tso_size -> gso_size (or simply removing the if else endif construction 
altogether :-)

-2 but unfortunately, also this new driver, although it get's loaded, it 
still reports (ethtool eth0)....
current message level : 0x0..033 (51)
Link detected : no

I hope I'm writing to the right person to help solve this issue

This link detection issue seems to trouble realtek drivers for a long time.

-- 
Thomas Roes
Switact
Kvk: Leiden 28100283