Realtek RTL8111E

[lrusak]

I seem to be having some issues with my motherboards onboard network adapter. It is a Realtek PCI-E GbLAN controller RTL8111E.

I am booting from a USB stick which has ipxe.usb on it with a customs script.

I am having DHCP problems as it won't accept. I have put in an intel PCI network card and it will accept the DHCP, but I'd prefer to use the onboard gigabit connection.

I don't know if it is a driver issue with the RTL8111E or what.

This is what it shows with DEBUG=dhcp


I could try and do a TFTP boot using the onboard pxe boot client but I'd rather not go through the trouble setting that up on my DDWRT router.

Thanks for any help.

[robinsmidsrod]

If you build your ipxe.usb with some debug statements for the realtek driver, you might be able to get some more information that could help solve the problem. Build like this: make bin/ipxe.usb DEBUG=realtek:3

[lrusak]

(2012-06-27 08:01)robinsmidsrod Wrote:  If you build your ipxe.usb with some debug statements for the realtek driver, you might be able to get some more information that could help solve the problem. Build like this: make bin/ipxe.usb DEBUG=realtek:3

I didn't even know that was an option. It seems like a lot of motherboards these days have this ethernet driver.

what is the ":3" for?

Is there anyway toget ipxe to store a log of the debug output?

[robinsmidsrod]

Yeah, realtek is quite common for onboard ethernet in cheap consumer motherboards.

The :3 is the bitfield that describes what kind of debug information to log, so in binary 3 = 2 + 1, which means the two least significant bits are on, so you're seeing stuff for log level 1 and 2.

To store the output you need to enable either syslog or serial console. http://ipxe.org/console should help you out. Since you're debugging a network driver you mostly need to use serial (and the machine you're trying to boot must have a real serial port, USB isn't supported).

[robinsmidsrod]

If you don't have a serial port, you can try to use a second network card, and do syslog output via that one, but that is quite an advanced alternative.

You can start with just DEBUG=realtek (which is log level 1) and try to take a photo of the screen, as you did earlier.

The first line of debug information is usually the most important one, so try to ensure it doesn't scroll off screen.