RTL8111 Network Driver (Wake-On-LAN not working and slow)


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Hello, I'm new to unraid.

 

I have a test System here, i have unraid 6.8.3 up and running.

Hardware:

MB: ASRock FM2A85X-ITX

CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon™ HD Graphics @ 3400 MHz

RAM: 2x4GB DDR3

Storage: 3x3TB (one of those as Parity)

Cache: 1x 500GB and 1x 256GB SSDs

 

The problems I'm having are as follows:

- Wake-On-LAN not working.

- Slow Network speed. (about 500-600Mbit)

 

Before Unraid, this system was running on Windows 10 and I had none of those problems. (Wake-On-LAN was working, speed about 850-900 Mbit)

I noticed that the LEDs on the Ethernet Port are completely off when the system is turned off. In the Windows Setup, the LEDs kept blinking after shutdown.

After a google search, I found out that the Ethernet Chip is an Realtek RTL8111. 

 

I found this Guide, how to change out the drive to the official Realtek driver, but apt-get is not used on unraid.

The driver r8169 is the open-source one and the driver r8168 is the Realtek one.

Using the command lspci -v confirms, that r8169 is used.

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)
        Subsystem: ASRock Incorporation Motherboard (one of many)
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
        I/O ports at e000 [size=256]
        Memory at d0004000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [70] Express Endpoint, MSI 01
        Capabilities: [b0] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=4 Masked-
        Capabilities: [d0] Vital Product Data
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
        Capabilities: [140] Virtual Channel
        Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number 
        Kernel driver in use: r8169
        Kernel modules: r8169

So is there a way to change the driver on unraid so it uses the official Realtek driver (r8168)?

Or is there an other way to fix the problems?

 

Your help is much appreciated.

 

Thanks, and greetings from Switzerland 🙂

cpu

Edited by cpu2k6
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I almost hate to jump in on this topic.  To RealTek, in past years, Linux has been the ugly step-child.  The Windows driver was always their focus.  LimeTech, in the distant past, would use which ever driver gave the fewest problems-- the RealTek one or the open-source one.  Things got so bad and confusing, that LimeTech finally threw their hands and surrendered.  A decision was made to use the open source driver that was packaged in the Linux distro that is used as the basis for Unraid.  (At the time, the situation had gotten so bad that LimeTech was considering telling folks with RealTek NIC's with problems to get an Intel NIC based card...)

 

Having said all of that, Unraid does not have the same read-and-write speeds as a true RAID implementation.  (That is why it is named Unraid.)  If you are transferring large files to Unraid, it will depend on whether you are  using the cache drive(s) for the share.  It will also depend on the file size.  (One big file will transfer faster than a large number of small files.)  If you are writing directly to the protected array, there are two methods of writing and one is faster than the other.   (The original design concept for Unraid was that it was to be a write-once, read-many system.)

 

Reading files from Unraid will normally be much faster expect when you have large numbers of very small files.  (The file overhead operation on both ends is always a problem in reading from the server.  To my knowledge, the current file has to completely transferred to the requester before the next file can be requested.  So you can't get a jump on the file overhead process while the current file is in one of the caches waiting on the NIC...) 

 

I am using the r8169 driver and the RTL8111/8168/8411 module.  I see upload speeds (using an SSD cache) of 50-60MB/s for medium size files.  Large files (10+GB iso's) will hit 100+MB/s.   Large number of very small files (<1K) will drag it do to the 10MB/s range. 

 

I just ran a test on transfer from my WIN10 computer to my Test Bed server where I backed up my Documents folder (18.2GB).   The speed varied from 8MB/s to 112MB/s.  The elapsed time was 5 minutes 10 seconds.  I calculated that to be 58.7MB/s. 

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Hello, I had exactly the same Problem. Its not the Transfer Speed for me. The Problem for me is the not working WOL with this Driver.

I also find the Guide @cpu2k6 has found. The newest Driver can be found here: Driver 8168

It would be nice if its possible to run this driver to get back WOL.

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
        Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
        I/O ports at e000 [size=256]
        Memory at df004000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Memory at df000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [70] Express Endpoint, MSI 01
        Capabilities: [b0] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=4 Masked-
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
        Capabilities: [140] Virtual Channel
        Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number
        Capabilities: [170] Latency Tolerance Reporting
        Capabilities: [178] L1 PM Substates
        Kernel driver in use: r8169
        Kernel modules: r8169
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 15)

 

M/B: MSI H170M-A PRO (MS-7972) Version 2.0

BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. Version B.A0. Dated: 06/30/2018

CPU: Intel® Core™ i3-6100 CPU @ 3.70GHz

Memory: 16 GiB DDR4

Edited by backfmar
Hardware
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