13 hours ago, SinoBreizh said:

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in a previous comment, the kernel driver is apparently bad and disables power saving

Most users won't care about that, so it's still great to have native support, but the plugin can still be used to install a different driver, like it currently does, for example, for the 8125.

8 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

but the plugin can still be used to install a different driver, like it currently does, for example, for the 8125

The whole question was precisely whether the plugin would add support for the 8126/7...

Edited January 5Jan 5 by Kilrah

Roger that, I didn't understand that from the post I replied to, though they were just asking for Unraid support.

11 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Most users won't care about that

I'm honestly not so sure. Limetech themselves seem to care about it enough to have a blog about it on their homepage. And their latest article is about choosing the right hardware to keep power costs down.

I'd wager a non-negligible amount of people who are tech savvy enough to pick up Unraid, are probably also going down the C-state rabbit hole. Since unlike the TrueNAS community, I don't think most of us here are running homelabs where power efficiency is sacrificed on the altar of a hobby. 😂

Unraid also strikes me as an OS designed around power efficiency, since the whole value add compared to TrueNAS is you don't have to spin up all the disks to read from any single drive.

I didn't understand that from the post I replied to

No problem. To refocus on the original question though:

• Is it possible to install a driver without a plugin on Unraid?

• Is the dedicated Realtek Linux driver I mentioned earlier (copied the README) something which could be packaged into this plugin, or installed manually?

I've attached it here for everyone's convenience.

r8127-11.015.00.tar.bz2

For context also, it's the highlighted file on Realtek's website.

Edited January 5Jan 5 by SinoBreizh

There was a version bump to v9.016.01 driver version for the RTL8125 plugin. Change log of the plugin says:

2026.01.04

• Bump version to v9.016.01

--

I was not able to find any changelog on the realtek pages.

Anybody with some test results? I am new to the realtek game, kept having system freezes when on powersupersave policy and I am currently testing powersave with the previous version. I already upgraded the plugin and will be able to restart tomorrow (system is doing some job at the moment)... and currently my powertop shows very strange 0% everywhere.

Thanks for sharing and caring :-)

I'm starting to have trouble with my unraid setup, the network card dies on me, I believe this started happening after updating to 1gbps internet.
Sometimes it can go a day and sometimes weeks before a crash.

I updated to unraid 7.2.3 with no luck, and also tried installing the plugin for R8168 driver but then my unraid wouldn't get a correct ip, I believe i got a 169.254.x.x address.

this is what network card i have on my msi b550 gaming gen3:

lspci -nn | grep -i ethernet 2a:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 15)

ethtool -i eth0 driver: r8169 version: 6.12.54-Unraid firmware-version: rtl8168h-2_0.0.2 02/26/15 expansion-rom-version: bus-info: 0000:2a:00.0 supports-statistics: yes supports-test: no supports-eeprom-access: no supports-register-dump: yes supports-priv-flags: no

ChatGPT found this in my syslog-previous
r8169 0000:2a:00.0 eth0: NETDEV WATCHDOG... transmit queue 0 timed out

What are my options?

Thanks to ich777 and jinlife compiling the r8127 driver is incredibly easy:

Just grab jinlife's repo (GitHub link) and compile it in ich777's unraid_kernel docker (GitHub link).

Result: https://github.com/vesqute/unraid-r8125-r8152-driver

The unraid-r8127.plg installed fine for me and the card works, though I haven't done any further tests yet.

To activate ASPM, add this as Modprobe config to the driver under Tools -> System Drivers:

options r8127 aspm=1

Result in AutoTweak:

14 hours ago, vesqute said:

Thanks to ich777 and jinlife compiling the r8127 driver is incredibly easy:

Just grab jinlife's repo (GitHub link) and compile it in ich777's unraid_kernel docker (GitHub link).

Result: https://github.com/vesqute/unraid-r8125-r8152-driver

The unraid-r8127.plg installed fine for me and the card works, though I haven't done any further tests yet.

To activate ASPM, add this as Modprobe config to the driver under Tools -> System Drivers:

options r8127 aspm=1

Result in AutoTweak:

I installed the driver / plugin today, and it seems to be working fine so far. However, when I run a speed test using the Docker container “SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest”, I lose the connection to the server. After that, I have to restart the server to make it reachable again.

The connection speed does not seem to matter. This happens both over Wi-Fi at around 1.2 Gbit/s and from my PC with a 10 Gbit network card.

If I stream something via Plex, everything works perfectly fine, even with large files — no issues at all.

Is there any way to check what happens at that moment in the logs, or are there specific logs I should look at?

B/R

13 minutes ago, Nerdcloud said:

I installed the driver / plugin today, and it seems to be working fine so far. However, when I run a speed test using the Docker container “SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest”, I lose the connection to the server. After that, I have to restart the server to make it reachable again.

The connection speed does not seem to matter. This happens both over Wi-Fi at around 1.2 Gbit/s and from my PC with a 10 Gbit network card.

If I stream something via Plex, everything works perfectly fine, even with large files — no issues at all.

Is there any way to check what happens at that moment in the logs, or are there specific logs I should look at?

B/R

ASPM enabled or disabled?

Link drops are a known problem with the r8125 NICs with ASPM enabled, might also happen with the r8127. With the r8125 disconnecting/connecting the cable or disabling/enabling the port (switch or server side) would bring the link back up.

ASPM is disabled and my onboard 2,5 gbit nic with the r8125 Driver worked just fine all the time.

I also removed the the Plugin for my onboard nic and disabled the device in my BIOS to avoid any Problems.

Disconnecting and reconnecting the cable or restarting the Switchport doesnt Work.

edit: interesting, downloading via SMB with 110-140 mb's without any issues... damn whats the problem with the speedtest over the docker SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest
edit2: smb via 2,5 gbit killed it again, server restart needed.

Edited January 15Jan 15 by Nerdcloud

Found some time today to put a second card in my workstation (quite annoying on an ITX build) to test throughput:

• Unraid -> workstation: full speed

• Workstation -> Unraid: about 1 Gbit

• Workstation -> Ubuntu Live (instead of Unraid): about 7 Gbit

Clearly the driver doesn’t play all that nice with Unraid (7.2.3 here) yet. I’ll test some more and the SpeedTest docker later.

17 hours ago, vesqute said:

Thanks to ich777 and jinlife compiling the r8127 driver is incredibly easy:

Just grab jinlife's repo (GitHub link) and compile it in ich777's unraid_kernel docker (GitHub link).

Result: https://github.com/vesqute/unraid-r8125-r8152-driver

The unraid-r8127.plg installed fine for me and the card works, though I haven't done any further tests yet.

To activate ASPM, add this as Modprobe config to the driver under Tools -> System Drivers:

options r8127 aspm=1

Result in AutoTweak:

Excellent. Thank you.
I had tried to do this myself but got stuck compiling things.
Installed fine and my old bond settings kicked straight back in with the 10GBe taking on the main duties with the 2.5GBe going to fallback.

High speed transfers are back again.

2 hours ago, vesqute said:

Found some time today to put a second card in my workstation (quite annoying on an ITX build) to test throughput:

• Unraid -> workstation: full speed

• Workstation -> Unraid: about 1 Gbit

• Workstation -> Ubuntu Live (instead of Unraid): about 7 Gbit

Clearly the driver doesn’t play all that nice with Unraid (7.2.3 here) yet. I’ll test some more and the SpeedTest docker later.

Well, as always, ASPM was the culprit, full speed both ways with it deactivated...

4 hours ago, Nerdcloud said:

ASPM is disabled and my onboard 2,5 gbit nic with the r8125 Driver worked just fine all the time.

I also removed the the Plugin for my onboard nic and disabled the device in my BIOS to avoid any Problems.

Disconnecting and reconnecting the cable or restarting the Switchport doesnt Work.

edit: interesting, downloading via SMB with 110-140 mb's without any issues... damn whats the problem with the speedtest over the docker SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest
edit2: smb via 2,5 gbit killed it again, server restart needed.

Couldn't reproduce the problem.

Been pushing files back and forth using SMB and running the speedtest docker without any problems.

Have you tried a different (live) distro to make sure it's software and not hardware?

12 minutes ago, vesqute said:

Well, as always, ASPM was the culprit, full speed both ways with it deactivated...

Couldn't reproduce the problem.

Been pushing files back and forth using SMB and running the speedtest docker without any problems.

Have you tried a different (live) distro to make sure it's software and not hardware?

Mhmm okay, good point. I’ll test it over the weekend with a live distro to see if the issue occurs there as well. Maybe it’s a faulty card.

*Edit: everything works fine on Ubuntu live, so i will wait for nativ Support in unraid as long as the Plugin doesnt Work for me :)

Edited January 19Jan 19 by Nerdcloud

Hello everyone, I am currently setting up a virtual machine on my machine. I have directly connected a 4-port RTL8125 (2.5G) network card and selected one of the network ports for use by the virtual machine (hereinafter referred to as VM1). However, after starting VM1 and entering the Debian 12 installer, when I proceeded to the network detection step, the page displayed the network card enpxxx, but then the webpage froze, and the host machine restarted.

If I don't mount the network card, the virtual machine starts normally.

In fact, I have used this network card on another machine, also with unraid, and encountered the same issue.

I searched for relevant information and found a driver application provided by the community. I installed the r8125(b) application, but it didn't work.

How can I solve this problem? I don't even know what caused it.

Summary:
I am experiencing recurring network connectivity failures on Unraid when using a Realtek RTL8126 5GbE NIC. During the failure, ICMP (ping) continues to work, but TCP-based services such as the Unraid WebUI, SSH, and Docker containers (e.g., Plex) become unreachable. The network link remains up and there are no obvious kernel or system errors, but NIC statistics show increasing RX-side errors and missed packets while the issue is occurring. Attached is a screenshot of the error output, and the diagnostics zip.

On 1/23/2026 at 3:59 AM, jasssssson said:

How can I solve this problem? I don't even know what caused it.

A 4 port 2,5G card usually needs more than a single PCiE lane.

Your "resets on use" are likely a sign of missing lanes.

(Note that "fininding" the card at boot time does not mean it is working too later on. Many "good" cards have a buildin PCiE switch which allows them to step down to lower lanes/speed, but the cheap ones have simply connected each lane to each network port. The card itself is found on "lane 1" (always conected), but communication later on is on lane 2-4. You can check this out by trying different ports on the card, ONE of them should work)

So check your slots if the one you have put it in is not only physically capable to take the card, but also electrically.

Edited January 24Jan 24 by MAM59

Hello, I have purchased a new 4-port i226v network card, but I encountered the same issue. I tried using different ports, but the problem still persists. I will post a thread in the general support forum. It seems that the issue is not related to the 8125

I finally found a working setup for my R8125. By now, if I enabled ASPM and the gigabit port on my Fritzbox, I always ended up with 30Mbit/s upload speed. If I switched the Fritzbox tob100Mbit Upload was 95 Mbit, so full speed. The issue was ASPM. Now here what I've done.

1. Go to unraid page "main"

2. Click on your flash drive "flash"

3. Scroll down and you see Unraid OS

4. Add following

   pcie_aspm=force pcie_aspm.policy=powersupersave pcie_port_pm=force

Then open /boot/config/modprobe.d/

( this is on your flash drive) and check if r8125.conf file is available. If not create it.

Paste following:

options r8125 aspm=1

options r8125 eee_enable=0

options r8125 s5wol=0

Now you have ASPM enabled, which allows your server c-states up to C10. BUT you won't get full network speed, as this enables also L1.1 and L1.2, which seem to prevent full speed.

Use this command in shell to get your NIC PCIE Address.

lspci | grep -i ethernet

mine shows 04:00.0.

now you need to create a script e.g. in plugin "user scripts" with the code below. Change the PCIE address to yours.

# Enable only L1, disable L1.1 and L1.2
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:04:00.0/link/l1_aspm
echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:04:00.0/link/l1_1_aspm
echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:04:00.0/link/l1_2_aspm

run this script on array start.

Restart your server.

I have included this in my powertop autotune script, which I run on array start (Ive attached it). So far, everythings running great. Server reaches c10 with max network speed.

powertop-autotune.txt

Edited January 30Jan 30 by Nemu

On 1/30/2026 at 9:58 PM, Nemu said:

I finally found a working setup for my R8125. By now, if I enabled ASPM and the gigabit port on my Fritzbox, I always ended up with 30Mbit/s upload speed. If I switched the Fritzbox tob100Mbit Upload was 95 Mbit, so full speed. The issue was ASPM. Now here what I've done.

1. Go to unraid page "main"

2. Click on your flash drive "flash"

3. Scroll down and you see Unraid OS

4. Add following

   pcie_aspm=force pcie_aspm.policy=powersupersave pcie_port_pm=force

Then open /boot/config/modprobe.d/

( this is on your flash drive) and check if r8125.conf file is available. If not create it.

Paste following:

options r8125 aspm=1

options r8125 eee_enable=0

options r8125 s5wol=0

Now you have ASPM enabled, which allows your server c-states up to C10. BUT you won't get full network speed, as this enables also L1.1 and L1.2, which seem to prevent full speed.

Use this command in shell to get your NIC PCIE Address.

lspci | grep -i ethernet

mine shows 04:00.0.

now you need to create a script e.g. in plugin "user scripts" with the code below. Change the PCIE address to yours.

# Enable only L1, disable L1.1 and L1.2
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:04:00.0/link/l1_aspm
echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:04:00.0/link/l1_1_aspm
echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:04:00.0/link/l1_2_aspm

run this script on array start.

Restart your server.

I have included this in my powertop autotune script, which I run on array start (Ive attached it). So far, everythings running great. Server reaches c10 with max network speed.

powertop-autotune.txt

gotta try this over the weeekend. I can get into C10 if using kernel driver, but I get 20-30mb/s only. using ich777 driver gets me the speed, but system won´t go lower than C3.

20 hours ago, nassauer said:

gotta try this over the weeekend. I can get into C10 if using kernel driver, but I get 20-30mb/s only. using ich777 driver gets me the speed, but system won´t go lower than C3.

That would be interesting, because that's exactly what I also have observed in my environment. Please keep us updated with your findings.

It's good to see that this plugin is still alive, functioning and supported!
I've just picked up a new MoBo with a Realtec 8126 5G on board, and it looks like I'll want to install this plugin after getting the new hardware installed.

I might not get a full 5GB/s out of it yet, but, well, I don't have any other devices on the network with > 1GB NICs, so it won't matter much for now, and there's plenty of time for the driver to mature before I'll really need it.

15 hours ago, JayDee73 said:

That would be interesting, because that's exactly what I also have observed in my environment. Please keep us updated with your findings.

Success! Well, at least a bit. I did manage to get the 8125 driver allowing C10 by adding only "options r8125 aspm=1" to modprobe. Thanks to a user on page 15 of this thread, who has the same mainboard (Gigabyte B760M DS3H). The only small downside is that although copying FROM a share can achieve full 2.5be speeds, copying TO a share is maxing out at 70-80mb/s after doing "ethtool -K eth0 tso off gso off gro off". I also can download with docker filezilla at 120mb/s (gigabit internet) to a share. but well ... I think it´s a good tradeoff.

I'm a little confused now. @nassauer @Nemu : For which driver are your modifications? Stock kernel driver or the 8125 Plugin driver?

2 hours ago, JayDee73 said:

I'm a little confused now. @nassauer @Nemu : For which driver are your modifications? Stock kernel driver or the 8125 Plugin driver?

the 8125 plugin driver. sorry for the confusion. I´ve been on the C10 hunt for weeks. Too long ;)